If you’re new, here is a breakdown of what you can expect from each issue.

If you missed our recent editions, you can catch up here. Some previous issues you might want to check out if you’re new include “A Deep Dive Into The Cash App’s Growth Machine”, “The Future Of Payment Initiation”, and “Current: Doing It Differently”.

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Fintech Radar is a must-read for fintech founders, operators, and investors. If that’s your target audience, placing an ad right HERE is a cost-effective way to reach them.

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💸 Stripe and Advent walk away from PayPal, Axios

🏃 The Rundown: Bloomberg reported last week that Advent International and Stripe have abandoned their pursuit of PayPal, and Axios confirmed it. The consortium had offered $60.50 a share in July, valuing PayPal at more than $53 billion, with roughly $50 billion of committed bank financing behind it. PayPal’s board considered the bid inadequate, flagged regulatory and financing hurdles, and never formally responded. PayPal closed the day before the report at $61.47, above the offer price, and fell as much as 16% the next morning. Block was part of the original approach back in April but left the group before the offer went in.

🥡 Takeaway: This was always a long shot, and I spent a good chunk of issue 171 of FR squinting this deal trying to make the logic work. Price is the easy thing to point at now that the deal has collapsed, and the price was certainly a problem, but a deal this size had several other ways to die and most of them were still sitting there unresolved when everyone walked away.

For example, buying PayPal means buying Braintree, which is Stripe’s most direct competitor in merchant acquiring, and that is an ordinary enough horizontal consolidation question that somebody was always going to ask some hard antitrust questions of. Underneath that sits PayPal’s licences, which run across dozens of jurisdictions, each requiring its own change of control approval on its own timeline. You are looking at a two-year regulatory project with a genuine chance of getting to the end of it and being told no in any one of the many markets PayPal operates in.

Then there was the shape of the group bidding on it, which never stopped being strange. A private equity firm and a direct competitor, buying it together and holding more or less equal stakes. Advent in typical PE style likely needs a return inside five to seven years and an exit at the end of it, while Stripe buying in meant a huge amount of integration work that would likely take five to seven years. I never heard a compelling answer for how that was meant to work in practice, and Block quietly stepping out before the offer went in did not exactly settle the question.

At the price on the table it was still worth a crack, and I don’t want that to get lost in the post-mortem. PayPal’s installed base and brand recognition are genuinely hard assets to rebuild from scratch, and the offer put all of it in play at a fraction of the roughly $360 billion the company was worth at the 2021 peak. If you back yourself to fix the product, taking a swing at that is entirely rational.

Also, set against the OpenRouter backdrop, the contrast between these two deals is pretty stark. That acquisition was a bet on the next decade, buying the position Stripe wants to be holding when tokens are the new currency. PayPal, on the other hand, was a renovation. Additive, certainly, and there are some good fixtures in there, but you are still working on somebody else’s building. OpenRouter might change the shape of what Stripe is as the token economy grows, while PayPal mostly makes it bigger in the shape of its current business.

Which takes me all the way back to where I was last time I wrote about this deal. This still reads more like a private equity play than a Stripe one, and I’d expect it to come back at a higher price at some point, with or without Stripe at the table when it does.

📈 Vanguard is buying Altruist, Vanguard

🏃 The Rundown: Vanguard announced last week that it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Altruist, the custody and technology platform used by independent financial advisers. Neither company disclosed terms, though the Wall Street Journal put the deal at roughly $4 billion and other reporting has it at $4.6 billion in cash. Vanguard first invested in Altruist in 2020 and has held a board seat since. Altruist will run as a standalone business under founder Jason Wenk once the deal closes, which is expected later this year subject to regulatory approvals.

🥡 Takeaway: Altruist was marked at $1.9 billion in an April 2025 round. Roughly $4 billion about sixteen months later isn’t a bad outcome for a business that spent most of its life being described as the scrappy alternative in a market nobody thought was contestable.

Registered investment adviser custody has been Schwab and Fidelity for as long as anyone has been paying attention. What makes Altruist different is that it runs its own self-clearing broker-dealer, which takes years and a great deal of regulatory patience to build, and which is why a nice front end has never been enough to win here. This is the direct-access-versus-rented-access game again, and Altruist spent the last few years earning the direct version while everyone assumed the category was closed.

Vanguard has been circling this for six years. They wrote the minority cheque in 2020 explicitly to bring competition into custody, sat on the board, watched it work, and have now concluded that a minority stake was not the position they wanted to be in. Salim Ramji has been fairly open about advice being where Vanguard grows next, and owning the plumbing that independent advisers run on is a reasonable way to get there.

There is an obvious tension in this and analysts spotted it immediately. Vanguard has its own advice business, and the 6,000-odd advisers on Altruist compete with it. Handing your custody, your clearing and your client data to a firm that also sells against you is not a comfortable position, and I’d expect it to come up in every sales conversation Altruist has for the next year or so.

☁️ Google launches Gemini Enterprise for Financial Services, Cyber Daily

🏃 The Rundown: Google Cloud launched Gemini Enterprise for Financial Services last week, an agentic AI product aimed at capital markets and corporate banking. It ships with a Google-managed Financial Research agent carrying more than 50 financial skills and 13 connectors into licensed data sources, including FactSet, LSEG, Moody’s, S&P Global and SEC Edgar. It works with both Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Deutsche Bank was a design partner, CME Group is an early customer, and the product is available in preview.

🥡 Takeaway: The thirteen connectors are the product here, and the model feels almost incidental. Anyone can point a frontier model at a credit memo. Getting FactSet, LSEG, Moody’s and S&P Global to agree that their licensed data can be piped into somebody else’s agent is a commercial negotiation with firms whose whole business is selling that data, and every one of those deals is a year of lawyers. It has never been easier to ship the software part, but the licensing is where the actual work sits.

Thomas Kurian’s line about financial professionals wanting a platform that “doesn’t lock them into any one model or ecosystem” is aimed at someone in particular, and a model vendor promising not to lock you into a model is a fairly bold statement. Still, I take the point. Putting Microsoft 365 compatibility in a Google press release is not an accident either. The buyer here is a bank that already has Copilot deployed, has watched a few peers sign exclusive arrangements with a single lab, and would quite like not to pick a winner just yet.

The plumbing work is less glamorous than the launch material suggests, which I mean as a compliment. Marie-Jeanne Deverdun at Deutsche Bank talks about reducing manual research effort in the corporate bank, and that is honestly likely what the bulk of this does. Somebody spends their morning pulling filings, reconciling three data vendors and building a comps table before they get to the part of the job requiring judgement. Handing the first three hours to an agent is a productivity play, and those tend to land better in an institution than anything framed as replacing the analyst.

This is a preview, and having 66 named systems integrators lined up before general availability tells you how much of the eventual value here is implementation work rather than product. The claims that matter for a regulated user are the ones about data lineage and explainability, and those are also the ones nobody has really stress-tested yet. I’d be interested to see what a model risk management team makes of it once it’s out of preview.

💳 Visa joins BLOOM with Nium as its first settlement partner, Nium

🏃 The Rundown: Visa announced last week that it has joined BLOOM, the Monetary Authority of Singapore initiative testing interoperability between traditional payment systems and stablecoin rails. Nium is Visa’s first partner to pilot stablecoin settlement under the program, working with regulated US dollar and euro-denominated stablecoins, and the two will test whether settlement can run seven days a week including weekends and public holidays. MAS launched BLOOM, which stands for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency, in October 2025. Existing participants include Circle, DBS, OCBC, Partior, Stripe and UOB. Neither company disclosed a timeline for the pilot.

🥡 Takeaway: Settlement is what projects like this are trying to rebuild. As we all know, Visa doesn’t move money for consumers. It settles between issuers and acquirers, and that position is where a great deal of the value sits. Running that on stablecoin rails means Visa keeps its seat and swaps the plumbing underneath it, which is why the company keeps describing this as complementary rather than a replacement. That is corporate speak for “we intend to still be here afterwards.”

Visa is also running this inside a MAS program rather than putting out a press release of its own and just launching a pilot. Singapore has deliberately made itself the place where this sort of thing gets tested with the regulator already in the room, and the banks have turned up accordingly. Being supervised while you experiment is worth a lot more than being quick, particularly for a network whose entire product is trust.

This sits in the same family of moves the schemes have been making for a while now. Core volume growth in mature markets is not what it once was, so Visa and Mastercard keep climbing into adjacent revenue: value-added services, fraud and identity, and now the settlement layer for tokenised money. The version of the stablecoin story where the networks get disintermediated always assumed they would sit still and watch it happen. Visa is instead making sure that if settlement does move onto stablecoins, it is Visa’s settlement doing the moving.

As with all these announcements, this is a pilot, with one partner, in one jurisdiction, and no disclosed timeline. The thing I’d watch is whether it extends past Nium and past Singapore, because that is the point at which it stops being an experiment and starts being how Visa settles.

🏦 CommBank launches PaidIt, Commonwealth Bank

🏃 The Rundown: Commonwealth Bank launched PaidIt last week, a platform for paying people an organisation no longer holds valid details for, covering settlements, remediation payments and refunds. A matching engine runs identity and account checks to decide which payments go out automatically and which need a human. It runs on the New Payments Platform (NPP), PayID and ConnectID, and CBA says the median time from a recipient starting a claim to funds arriving is under two minutes. Built by the bank’s venture scaling arm x15ventures, it is already in use internally, with corporate and institutional clients to follow.

🥡 Takeaway: Bank innovation arms usually ship a me-too version of whatever fintech launched eighteen months earlier, so it is good to see one turn up with an idea of its own. Paying somebody when the only thing you hold on them is a postal address from 2013 is a genuinely hard problem and an unfashionable one, which is probably why you don’t see a ton of startups chasing the opportunity. In other words, this is a really unsexy problem.

Australia stops issuing cheques on 30 June 2028 and stops accepting them on 30 September 2029, at which point the system closes for good. The cheque has been the payer of last resort for decades, because when you do not have someone’s bank details you post one to their last known address and the problem becomes theirs. Take that away and every organisation sitting on money it owes to people it cannot find needs a new answer, with a date attached.

There are startups chasing this in other markets. Eisen raised $18.5 million earlier this year to automate escheatment and unclaimed property compliance, which is the same thing approached from the other end, namely what happens to money once nobody can find the owner. The Australian version has a different shape though, because PaidIt only works the way it does by sitting on the New Payments Platform, PayID and ConnectID. PayID lets you address a payment to a phone number instead of a BSB and account number, and ConnectID checks the person is who they say. There is no direct equivalent to that combination in the US, which is part of why Eisen is shaped around compliance and reporting while PaidIt is shaped around getting the money out the door.

The open question is whether CBA stays interested. This is a bank that turned over $30.2 billion and made $11 billion in cash profit in the year to June, and PaidIt could be a complete commercial success and still not register against numbers like that. Products like this tend to die inside big banks not because they fail but because they never get large enough to defend at a budget meeting. As much as the launch material talks up the size of the opportunity, keeping something this small alive inside a beast that size is the real challenge.

💰 Entropy raises $14M to trade what you cannot buy, LHC

🏃 The Rundown: Entropy announced a $14 million seed round last week led by Ribbit Capital, alongside a $40 million position in HYPE, the token that covers the operator bond Hyperliquid requires under its HIP-3 framework. The team comes out of Citadel Securities, Optiver, Millennium and Polymarket, and is building perpetual futures markets for assets that are difficult to trade, starting with pre-IPO equity. Its first market, a cash-settled perpetual tracking Anthropic’s valuation, is live on Hyperliquid with maximum leverage of 3x and an initial open interest cap of $3 million.

🥡 Takeaway: Pre-IPO exposure has long been the thing retail could not get at, and Entropy’s answer is to stop trying to sell the asset and sell a number instead. ANTH is a cash-settled perpetual where each point represents a billion dollars of implied market capitalisation, so a price of 1,000 says the market reckons Anthropic is worth a trillion. Holders get no shares, no voting rights, no dividends and no claim on the company. What trades is other people’s opinion of a private valuation, which is clever in many ways even if it rhymes with prediction markets.

Citadel Securities, Optiver and Millennium turn out market microstructure people, and the pitch here is a technical one about oracle design and funding rate mechanics. Their first primitive is an oracle that weights external price feeds by how much executable depth sits on the order book, which is a serious answer to the problem that has dogged synthetic pre-IPO markets, where the reference price is never quite defensible at the moment it needs to be.

The $3 million open interest cap tells you how early this is, and a contract that settles in August 2028 on a 30-day average if Anthropic never lists is a fair distance from price discovery if we’re being honest. Retail access to pre-IPO exposure has been promised plenty of times over the last decade and has usually ended up as a thin market with bad prints. Let’s see if this is different.

💰 Bevel raises $6M, The Insurer

🏃 The Rundown: Bevel announced a $6 million seed round last week backed by Shakti VC, Resolute Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners, alongside a group of high-net-worth angels. The Austin-based company was formed after the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires, in which chief executive Adam Freed’s childhood home was destroyed, and started by building free AI tools that helped survivors rebuild household inventories for their claims. It is now building a licensed personal lines brokerage for high-net-worth households, starting at homes with $1 million and up in replacement value.

🥡 Takeaway: Bevel built free claims tools for people whose houses had burned down, and by the company’s account they were used by more than a quarter of Palisades and Eaton survivors. That is a genuinely useful product, and it also happens to have produced a list of precisely the households who now need to find cover in a market that has gone cold on writing them. Smart.

Freed’s framing is that personal insurance is due the shift that turned stockbrokers into wealth managers, with Bevel playing the downside risk counterpart. That is a good place to stand, especially with wealth managers lined up as referral partners, because it turns an annual renewal into an ongoing advisory relationship held by somebody who already has the client’s attention.

The backdrop is carriers retreating from exactly this risk in California, which is what makes an affluent homeowner suddenly interested in a broker who knows who is still writing. Freed cites market estimates putting as many as 70% of the highest-value homes in America underinsured, which I would treat as a broker’s number even if the direction is probably right.

🎧 Premium Cards Get Weird, Fintech Takes (August 26)

Alex Johnson and Matthew Goldman of Totavi get into why every fintech now wants a premium card, the four or five million dollars a bank wants sitting on the balance sheet before a card program goes live, and whether asset-backed cards secured against homes and car titles hold up through a full credit cycle.

🎧 Acquiring Banks and Creating an Underwriting Moat in Mexico, Fintech One-on-One (August 27)

René Saúl talks to Peter Renton about building Kapital into the largest B2B fintech in Latin America and buying two banks on the way there, one of the deals agreed on a napkin. Add this one to your playlist.

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If you’re new, here is a breakdown of what you can expect from each issue.

If you missed our recent editions, you can catch up here. Some previous issues you might want to check out if you’re new include “A Deep Dive Into The Cash App’s Growth Machine”, “The Future Of Payment Initiation”, and “Current: Doing It Differently”.

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🤖 Stripe buys OpenRouter, CNBC

🏃 The Rundown: Stripe confirmed last week that it is acquiring OpenRouter, the gateway that lets developers reach hundreds of AI models through a single API. No price was disclosed, including in the letter Stripe sent its own investors. In that letter, Patrick Collison, John Collison and Will Gaybrick called it Stripe’s largest-ever acquisition, following Bridge, Privy and Metronome, and said they expect it to close in the coming weeks. They described OpenRouter as the largest token routing engine in the market, with token consumption compounding at 9% a week year to date, and said Stripe’s H1 net revenue rose 41% year on year.

🥡 Takeaway: And there it is, Stripe is now in the token resale business. What was originally a rumoured deal valued at $10 billion ended up coming in, according to Bloomberg, “above” $7 billion (the New York Times had it at roughly $7.5 billion, and Axios puts it above $8 billion), and mostly in stock. So the deal sits somewhere near 5% of Stripe’s value. It’s sort of interesting that Stripe has handled OpenRouter’s payments basically since day one, and I can imagine that was a helpful datapoint for the Stripe BizDev team, if you know what I mean.

The letter itself is quite a document. It declares that the singularity began on 1 January and that Stripe has been operating on that basis ever since, which is not a sentence you often find in an investor update. They walk it back a paragraph later to mean a large inflection in long-run trends rather than anything millenarian, but they did choose to lead with it, which is a grand way to kick off a letter about why you bought a token reseller.

On the actual deal, and less on the AI hyperbole, the letter does make some interesting points about the logic behind the acquisition. Specifically, capital and intelligence are the two digital flows every business now runs on, so having built the thing developers use to manage a revenue pipeline, Stripe wants to own the thing they use to manage an intelligence pipeline. Token spend behaves like payment volume: high frequency, per-unit pricing, sensitive to routing, and awful to reconcile. That is the shape of problem Stripe has been building machinery for the entire time it has existed, and that machinery will apply just as well to the token economy.

So that’s all well and good, and for the most part it makes sense. What I hadn’t really thought about was how this stitches together with some of the other products they’ve been assembling in, loosely, this space. Take Metronome, which Stripe closed back in January for a reported $1 billion, and things sort of get interesting. Metronome does metered billing for the likes of Anthropic and Nvidia, and they note in the letter that metered billing in an AI context is inseparable from token serving and consumption itself. Radar is the other one worth throwing into the mix, built to catch card fraud and now apparently catching token fraud at some of the largest AI companies. Neither of those is the reason for the deal, but in combination they show why the opportunity might make more sense than it did at first blush.

On the price, they got in front of the obvious question, pointing out that the core payments engine is profitable enough to support acquisitions like this and that the share count is lower now than three years ago despite the M&A. That’s a real answer, though a roughly $8 billion mostly-stock deal is still issuance, and it nets out only because they’ve been buying back faster than they print. What they draw from it is the more interesting bit: that staying private is an advantage going into all this, which suggests the IPO filing docs stay on the shelf a while longer.

When this was still a rumour I said the thing to watch was whether the labs would keep sending the same share of their traffic through a router once a payments company owned it. I still think it’s an interesting question. Stripe sits between every major lab and a large slice of developer demand, deciding which model handles what, while also being a significant customer of those same labs. I could see them staying relaxed about that, or deciding fairly quickly that the routing decision is one they’d rather make themselves.

🛠️ Ramp built its own model router and is giving it away, TechCrunch

🏃 The Rundown: Ramp launched Router last week, a model routing service that lets companies reach OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Moonshot, Minimax, Nvidia, xAI and Z.ai through a single API. Customers can route on provider flex tiers, on up to three benchmarks of their choosing, or send only the harder problems to the expensive models, with a dashboard covering token spend, cost, latency and fallback attempts. Ramp built it internally over three years for its own use before deciding to sell it. It’s free until the end of 2026, with a $26 launch credit and inference costs paid separately, and it’s US-only for now. Pricing for 2027 hasn’t been disclosed.

🥡 Takeaway: In the same week Stripe paid somewhere north of $8 billion for a model router, Ramp launched one it had built in-house over three years and is handing it out free until December. Amazing timing for a release, and it sets up an interesting natural experiment on the “build vs buy” front for model routers.

For Ramp, this is a classic scratching-their-own-itch story. They needed to route their own model calls, built the thing that does it, and have now decided the tooling is good enough to sell to everyone else. So a corporate card company produced a competent router as a by-product of running its own stack. Sounds familiar.

It’s obvious Stripe isn’t buying the tech here. They’re buying OpenRouter’s market position: the traffic, the developer defaults, and a view of who spends what across every major model. Fine. Except developer defaults in this market have proven fairly portable, the model mix changes month to month, and swapping a router is closer to a config change than a migration. The alternative hypothesis is that the lock-in is thinner than the price assumes, and a free alternative turning up inside a week doesn’t strengthen the case.

The reason Ramp bothered is the more interesting part, and a peek into what’s happening in the world of wallets to workflows. Ramp’s whole pitch is stopping companies spending money badly, and token spend has become one of the fastest-growing and least-governed lines in a lot of startup P&Ls. Ramp already sells AI token monitoring, and routing is the step where monitoring becomes control, because you can’t enforce a spending policy on something you don’t sit in front of. Looked at that way it’s a card programme for tokens, which is a very Ramp thing to build. Deeper and deeper into the workflows they go.

It’ll be interesting to see which way these two bets go. Stripe’s view is that the routing position is worth owning outright and gets more valuable as token volume climbs. Ramp’s is that routing is a feature you bolt onto something you already sell. The free version showing up days after the expensive one is not the strongest opening for the expensive one.

🤝 Visa and Mastercard join the Agentic Payments Alliance, Rain

🏃 The Rundown: Rain, the stablecoin payments infrastructure company, launched the Agentic Payments Alliance last week with more than 25 founding members. Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Solana, Remitly, Shift4, Evertec, Lithic, Sardine, Chainalysis, Fireblocks and Uniswap Labs are all on the list. Rain says the alliance will be run collectively by its founding members rather than owned by any one company, with early work covering shared research, testing standards for agent identity and authorisation, and advocacy on the regulatory questions.

🥡 Takeaway: Visa and Mastercard already have competing products here. Visa shipped Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard shipped Agent Pay and then Agent Pay for Machines, and both have spent the last eighteen months telling anyone who will listen that their version of agent credentials is the one to build against. Getting the two of them to sit in the same standards body this early is not nothing.

One major reason they’re all in the tent is likely to sort out the liability question, and it is conspicuous that the launch material doesn’t mention it. When an agent buys the wrong thing, or buys the right thing twice, or a merchant disputes a purchase no human ever clicked on, somebody has to eat it. Cards took decades to settle that question, and the chargeback framework that came out of it is arguably the most valuable thing the networks own. There is no equivalent for an agent acting inside a mandate, and nobody wants to be the one who writes the first rule and discovers they’ve written themselves the losing side of it.

This also sits neatly inside the pattern I’ve been banging on about all year, which is the schemes steadily moving up the stack. Core volume growth in mature markets is flat, so Visa and Mastercard keep buying and building into the layers above it: fraud, identity, value-added services, and now the authorisation layer for agents. Turning up early to a standards body is how you make sure the eventual standard looks a lot like the product you already shipped. On that note, I’d expect both of them to turn up on more or less every agentic standards body going while this shakes out. A seat costs next to nothing, and if you’re sitting at all of the tables you can’t really pick the wrong one.

I’d temper the excitement a little though. Standards coalitions are also where good ideas go to move very slowly, and this one has 25-odd members and a charter it hasn’t written yet. Let’s see whether the two networks stay this agreeable once the standard starts to have money attached to it.

📊 Experian puts your credit score inside ChatGPT, PYMNTS

🏃 The Rundown: Experian upgraded its ChatGPT app last week so that UK consumers can pull their Experian Credit Score and score history inside ChatGPT itself. Edu Castro, managing director of Experian consumer services for the UK and Ireland, said it was about meeting people wherever they choose to engage. Experian’s reasoning is that AI platforms otherwise answer credit questions from generic public information that may be wrong. It follows a feature launched in June that lets people explore personal loan offers in the same place. Experian says it powers 8 in 10 UK credit card applications.

🥡 Takeaway: The standalone PFM app has been quietly dissolving into whatever assistant someone already has open, which I’ve yapped on about a fair bit this year from the startup side. This is the same move made by a credit bureau, to itself, on purpose.

Look at what Experian’s consumer business actually is. The free score is the hook, and the money is in the marketplace behind it: card and loan offers matched to your file, with a commission when you take one. That funnel has always assumed the consumer opens Experian’s app to check their number and sees the offers on the way past. Putting the score in ChatGPT gives that up. They’ve already moved the loan offers across too, so they’re relocating the whole funnel rather than just the top of it, which suggests somebody there did the maths and decided the traffic was going anyway.

The leverage they have is that a credit score is one of the few numbers about you that a model genuinely cannot infer. It can talk about credit all day, but it can’t tell you yours. The bureau holds the file, and if it’s going to get quoted inside an assistant it would rather be quoted accurately and get paid for it than be approximated for free. Owning the authoritative version of a fact is a decent position when everything else is being generated.

Whether that survives contact is another thing. The lender relationships are where Experian’s power sits, and those are not obviously portable to a surface where the assistant decides what to show and in what order. I could see this ending up as the version of the model everyone copies, or as the moment a bureau taught the assistant to do the comparison shopping and quietly became a data feed. It’ll take a couple of years to know which.

The distribution question is shifting from whose app someone opens to whose data an assistant reaches for, and Experian has just shown what it costs to be in that second group.

✈️ Revolut is building its own airport lounges, Finextra

🏃 The Rundown: Revolut announced last week that it plans to open a network of branded airport lounges across major European destinations, and has signed an agreement with Copenhagen Airport to open the first of them next year as part of a push into the Nordics. Revolut’s Hadi Nasrallah pointed to the 75 million customers on the platform and said the company wants to set a new standard for airport hospitality in Europe. Premium and Metal customers can already get into more than 1,000 lounges through the app. It follows the opening of Revolut’s first physical store, in Barcelona, earlier this year.

🥡 Takeaway: It’s sort of funny that we’ve spent years lamenting the disappearance of the branch, but slowly what’s old is new again and some kind of physical presence does matter. Yes, this isn’t a branch, but it’s a touch point for Revolut customers that’s likely just as costly (if not more so!) and is designed as a way for account holders to interact with the brand.

Now to be fair, the economics are less strange than the optics. Premium and Metal customers already get lounge access, and Revolut currently pays somebody else per visit for it. Running its own rooms turns a variable cost that grows with every subscriber into a fixed one, and subscription tiers are where the money is for this generation of neobanks. It also converts a benefit nobody sees into a branded room in a departure hall that thousands of people walk past daily, which is advertising that happens to pay part of its own rent.

Brazil got there well ahead of Europe on this. Nomad opened a nearly 600 sqm lounge at São Paulo’s Guarulhos airport back in 2023, and Nubank followed last year with a 1,000 sqm one across three floors in the same terminal for its Ultravioleta tier. Those markets figured out sooner that a premium tier has to feel like something rather than just unlock a list of perks in an app. And I think that’s what’s driving it for Revolut. The problem they’re solving is how you make a premium tier actually feel premium in a market where discounts and rewards are a dime a dozen.

The obvious question is how they actually pull this off. Airport hospitality is a real business with staff rosters, food safety, lease negotiations and a queue at 6am, and none of it responds to shipping a fix on Tuesday. Revolut has a long record of announcing more things than it finishes, and this is a category where a half-finished version is a bad room that people remember. Copenhagen next year is the one to judge it on, and I’d give it until there are three or four open before calling it a network.

💰 Rezolv raises a $12.5M Series A, FinTech Global

🏃 The Rundown: Rezolv, a Mumbai-based AI-native lending technology platform, announced a $12.5 million Series A last week led by Norwest, with Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India coming in alongside existing investor 3one4 Capital. The company was founded in 2024 by Karan Mehta and Sonali Jindal, who previously founded the lender Kissht, and works with more than 22 banks and NBFCs.

🥡 Takeaway: Collections is the least glamorous corner of lending and probably the most obvious place for AI. Rezolv says it handles 6.5 million minutes of borrower conversations a month across more than 12 million loan accounts, which gives you a sense of how much of the job is just people making calls in a language and a register that has to be got right.

Indian lending runs on volume and thin spreads, so recovery rates move the P&L directly rather than showing up as some vague efficiency gain a year later. I assume that makes it an easier sale than most AI pitches into banks, and it helps that the founders ran a lender themselves and are now selling to the institutions they used to compete with. They know exactly which part of the month the collections floor falls over.

🎧 The SMB Context Margin Paradox, Fintech Takes (August 19)

Alex Johnson and David Snitkof of Ocrolus get into why small business credit is so expensive to underwrite that most lenders don’t bother, and whether AI genuinely fixes that cost or just relocates it.

🎧 Stripe’s AI Strategy: Build More, Not Less, The a16z Show (August 17)

Will Gaybrick sits down with David George to explain why Stripe treats AI productivity as a reason to build more products rather than run a smaller company, including the detail that internal coding agents produced around 30% of Stripe’s pull requests in a single week. Add this one to your playlist.

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🙏 What did you think of this week’s issue of FR?

I Love It! ◌ I Like It ◌ Not Bad ◌ I Don’t Like It ◌ It’s Awful

If you’re new, here is a breakdown of what you can expect from each issue.

If you missed our recent editions, you can catch up here. Some previous issues you might want to check out if you’re new include “A Deep Dive Into The Cash App’s Growth Machine”, “The Future Of Payment Initiation”, and “Current: Doing It Differently”.

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💳 PayPal opens the door to Stripe and Advent, TechCrunch

🏃 The Rundown: The Wall Street Journal reported last week that PayPal is in talks to sell itself to a group including Stripe and private equity firm Advent International. Stripe and Advent proposed $60.50 a share in July, valuing PayPal at about $53 billion, which the board viewed as too little. The two sides have been negotiating a higher price since, and the Journal’s sources say a deal could come together within weeks. That July proposal was backed by roughly $50 billion of committed bank financing, with Stripe, Advent and Block putting up about $17 billion of equity between them (as CNBC reported at the time), and would leave Stripe and Advent holding equal stakes in a PayPal that stays in one piece.

🥡 Takeaway: I missed the initial offer Stripe and Co made when I took a week off FR, so let’s pick it up properly.

Stripe spent a decade taking checkout share off PayPal and is now trying to buy the company outright. PayPal’s market value sits at roughly a seventh of its 2021 peak, and a board that turns the July number down and then keeps negotiating is having an argument about price rather than about whether to sell, which I think speaks to where the company is today.

What Stripe would be getting is the thing it has never had, which is a direct relationship with the person paying. Stripe’s entire business runs through the merchant. PayPal turns up with something like 439 million active accounts, a checkout button that consumers actually recognise, and Venmo, which along with Cash App and Zelle is about as close as the US gets to a default way of moving money between people. Braintree comes with it, and that one competes head-on with Stripe, so that piece is likely just some vanilla consolidation.

That much bank debt against a business whose branded checkout share has been slipping for years is a lot to service while you’re also trying to fix the product. Advent will have gone through the cash story meticulously. Deals this size usually earn their return on cost-outs, and cutting cost is rarely what wins back a consumer who has quietly stopped using you. And I think it’s fair to say PayPal needs a big product lift.

Which is why this is such an odd deal from a Stripe perspective. It feels like it should be a PE play. Bring costs down and extract value out of what was once an important fintech franchise. Stripe coming in and slurping up pieces that probably carry a ton of tech debt is harder for me to really understand. Having said that, there are likely some hidden gem assets in there they’ll be able to extract. Here in Australia, for example, PayPal holds a purchased payment facility (PPF) licence, and only PayPal and Wise hold one of those locally. You get the point. I’m sure there’s value in there somewhere, but I really need to squint to understand why Stripe wants a piece of PayPal.

Block sitting in the equity is also really odd. Jack Dorsey’s company has spent years building Cash App into the consumer wallet PayPal used to be, so writing a cheque into the group buying Venmo reads as either a hedge or the beginning of something more coordinated. Worth seeing what gets disclosed if this closes.

💳 RBC and BMO sell Moneris to Francisco Partners, Reuters

🏃 The Rundown: Royal Bank of Canada and BMO agreed last week to sell Moneris, the merchant acquirer they have jointly owned since 2000, to Francisco Partners for about C$2 billion in cash, split evenly. Moneris handles roughly one in three Canadian card transactions across more than 325,000 points of commerce. Both banks have signed long-term exclusive referral agreements to keep sending merchant customers to Moneris after the sale. The deal is subject to regulatory approval and is expected to close by the end of the banks’ first fiscal quarter of 2027.

🥡 Takeaway: RBC and BMO are keeping the piece they think is worth keeping, being the commercial relationship with the merchant, and handing over the processing, the terminals and the capital expenditure attached to them. The long-term referral agreements are how they hold onto it. They’ll still make the introduction. They just won’t own the thing the merchant plugs into.

Bank-owned acquiring has been unwinding for a while now. TD handed its Canadian merchant business to Fiserv last year, and most US regionals got out long before that. Acquiring turned into a software business while the banks were still treating it as a utility bolted onto the business account, and the bar that the likes of Stripe and Adyen have set on integrations, reporting and vertical software is not one you clear with a joint venture and a quarterly board meeting.

Francisco Partners already owns Verifone and holds a stake in Paysafe, so this is a third position in payments infrastructure and the only one that owns a market. Revenue was reported at around $700 million when the sale process started, and having two banks contractually feeding you customers is about as sheltered a starting position as acquiring offers. What it doesn’t come with is much room to run outside Canada, so the return has to come from modernising the platform and selling more software into the base it already has. Again, a straight-up PE play.

The Canadian reaction has been less about the price and more about who ends up holding the data. CBC ran a piece last week quoting analysts uneasy about a third of the country’s card transactions sitting with an American private equity owner while the trade fight with Washington grinds on. Payments infrastructure as a sovereignty question is new(ish), especially for a Canada and US deal, but I suspect it gets a proper airing during the Competition Act review.

🏦 Bank of America buys into Jio Credit, Reuters

🏃 The Rundown: Bank of America agreed last week to invest up to 182.68 billion rupees, about US$1.9 billion, for a stake of up to 49.9% in Jio Credit, the non-bank lending arm of Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Financial Services. The money goes in through a preferential allotment of shares and warrants, giving BofA 26.5% up front and taking it to 49.9% if the warrants are exercised. Reuters put the implied valuation at around $3.8 billion. Jio Credit started writing loans two years ago and held roughly $3.2 billion of assets under management at the end of June. Both sides get equal board representation, and the deal is subject to regulatory approval.

🥡 Takeaway: I’m always fascinated by these types of plays by big banks. For context, Bank of America doesn’t run retail banking outside the US and says this isn’t the start of one. So what it’s buying is exposure to Indian consumer credit growth without having to originate a single loan.

The graveyard there is well populated. Citi sold its Indian consumer business to Axis after decades of trying, and HSBC and Standard Chartered have both narrowed down to the affluent end. Branch licensing, priority sector obligations and the plain cost of acquiring a customer in India all push the players in the same direction. Jio doesn’t have those problems, because the distribution was built by the telco and the customers were already there.

Jio Credit’s side of it is capital and the machinery that goes around capital, being underwriting, funding, risk and treasury discipline for a loan book compounding this quickly. Two years to $3.2 billion of assets is fast, and Indian NBFCs that grow at that rate have a long history of learning about their credit quality all at once. Bringing in a partner with a balance sheet and equal board seats before that happens feels sensible.

Paying that much for half of a lender that only started writing loans two years ago is also a marker of how the Indian market has repriced. I’m interested to see if now is the time we see more action from foreign players looking to get in on the India growth story. A minority stake in a local group’s lending arm is a repeatable structure. You get the growth without the branch network, the licence queue or the priority sector obligations, and there are plenty of large Indian groups with a fast-growing lending arm that needs funding. There’s also no shortage of global banks that decided years ago that building in India wasn’t worth it but would still like the exposure.

📈 eToro buys TradeZero, Reuters

🏃 The Rundown: eToro agreed last week to acquire TradeZero, a US brokerage built for active traders, for up to $231 million in cash and up to 2.5 million newly issued Class A shares. TradeZero generated about $80 million of revenue in the twelve months to the end of June at 81% gross margins, and runs broker-dealer subsidiaries in the US, Canada, the Bahamas and the EU. eToro announced the deal alongside second quarter results, with net contribution up 9% year on year to $229 million and funded accounts up 18% to 4.28 million. The transaction needs regulatory approval and is expected to close in the first half of 2027.

🥡 Takeaway: The US is close to a new market for eToro. Europe and the UK were about 70% of funded accounts at the IPO and the Americas just 10%, which against today’s 4.28 million accounts is something like 400,000 across the region. So TradeZero’s $80 million of revenue, set against an eToro run rate near $1 billion, buys a decent slice of a US business rather than building one over the next few years. eToro hasn’t disclosed TradeZero’s customer count yet, which it says will come closer to closing.

What the deal buys is broker-dealer infrastructure. Building and licensing that in the US takes years, and picking up something that already clears, routes and handles shorting is the quick way to launch products domestically instead of porting a European app across and hoping.

The two customer bases are quite different beasts. eToro built its name on copy trading and a social feed, which brings in people who would rather somebody else made the call. TradeZero sells to day traders who want a short locator and fast execution, and that customer base is unsentimental about which platform it uses. A generous read is that this grows the base rather than concentrating it. eToro picks up a customer type it has never served, in a market where it hardly had a base to start with.

There’s a fair bit of movement in retail brokerage at the moment, with Robinhood pushing into the UK and Europe while eToro pushes the other way. Both are chasing the same destination, which is one app holding equities, options, crypto and whatever comes next, in every market where a retail investor will open an account. eToro reckons this adds to adjusted earnings per share in year one, which is not something you often get to say about a growth acquisition.

⚖️ JPMorgan debanked Polymarket, Bloomberg

🏃 The Rundown: The Financial Times reported last week that JPMorgan told Polymarket in October last year to find another bank, ending the relationship over regulatory concerns. At that point Polymarket was still barred from serving US customers under a 2022 CFTC enforcement action for running an unregistered derivatives platform, a ban the agency lifted last year while keeping an investigation open. Polymarket has since moved to a new lender it hasn’t named. A spokesperson said the company maintains “a close, active relationship with JPMorgan across multiple entities, operational integrations, and material handling of customer fund flows”, and that any other reading “fundamentally mischaracterises our relationship”. JPMorgan declined to comment.

🥡 Takeaway: Getting a bank and keeping it is one of the most punishing parts of building a consumer fintech startup. You spend a year on the product, another on the regulatory permissions, and then find out that a financial crime team you will never meet has a view about your category, and that view turns out to be the business. Prediction markets are in that spot right now, because whatever the CFTC decides an event contract is, a compliance officer at a large bank looks at the same screen and sees gambling, and gambling brings money laundering typologies, state law exposure and a supervisor who will ask about it later.

This was probably a fairly ordinary decision at the time. In October last year Polymarket was shut out of the US under the CFTC action, so a bank was looking at a customer with a live enforcement history and deciding the revenue didn’t cover the file. Since then the CFTC has let it back in and the company has raised at a very large valuation, but the underlying question hasn’t been settled, with an investigation still running and the states circling the category all year. The risk assessment that got Polymarket asked to leave hasn’t obviously changed.

Polymarket hasn’t denied losing the account. According to the article, the company says JPMorgan still handles material customer fund flows across multiple entities and operational integrations, and both of those things can be true at once. A bank can close the operating account that carries the name and the headline risk while sitting somewhere else in the chain, as a correspondent, as the bank behind whoever now holds the money, as the place the settlement leg lands. JPMorgan also had Shayne Coplan at a private banking conference in February and reportedly wants a look at underwriting an IPO. The relationship carried on in a part of the bank with a different risk appetite and a different fee line.

What I’m sort of interested in is whether this changes how these companies think about infrastructure. If your access to the banking system can be pulled by a committee you’ll never sit in front of, the logical response over time is to stop renting that access and go and earn it, which means licences, direct scheme relationships, and eventually somewhere to hold customer money that isn’t sitting on somebody else’s balance sheet. Crypto exchanges learned that lesson slowly and expensively, and the ones that came out of it in decent shape were the ones that went and got charters and direct connections rather than hoping the fourth banking partner would be the one that stuck.

💰 Yuno raises a $45M Series B, FinTech Futures

🏃 The Rundown: Yuno announced a $45 million Series B last week led by Global PayTech Ventures, with Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, QuantumLight, Monashees, Kaszek and Endeavor Catalyst taking part, alongside regional backers Rasmal Ventures, Further Ventures and GrowthX Capital. The Colombian-founded payments orchestration company has now raised $80 million in total, and says the money goes towards international expansion and getting to profitability.

🥡 Takeaway: Orchestration gets written off as a commodity and it’s anything but. Stitching the financial fabric of a business together is specialised work, and it gets very sticky once it’s in. A large merchant selling into ten countries ends up with a different acquirer, a different set of local payment methods and a different fraud stack in every one of them, and something has to decide which combination gets the transaction and what happens when the first attempt fails. Yuno sits in that layer, and nobody rips that out to save a few basis points.

The founding team came out of Rappi, so they built this having lived the problem across Latin America, where approval rates swing wildly by country and local methods like Pix matter more than cards do. Taking that competence into the Middle East looks like the obvious next move, and naming profitability as the goal on a round this size suggests they’re being reasonably disciplined about how fast they chase it.

💰 Naran raises $10M from Landel, Technext

🏃 The Rundown: Naran announced $10 million in equity and debt last week from Landel, a Dubai-based investment firm. Founded in 2025 by two former Yango executives, the company buys cars and motorbikes directly from manufacturers and puts them with ride-hailing and delivery drivers on rent-to-own terms of 12 to 60 months. It currently operates in Colombia, Peru, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, with Paraguay planned for September.

🥡 Takeaway: Vehicle finance for gig drivers works in markets where the bank won’t lend because the income is irregular and there’s no credit file to look at. The vehicle does the underwriting: it’s tracked, it earns every day, and it can be taken back. Moove has been building this model in Africa for years, and there’s room for more than one, particularly in Latin America where the ride-hailing platforms are big and vehicle supply for drivers is what caps their growth.

Naran also wants to open its fleet management software to third-party operators and lend against their fleets, which turns a capital-heavy rental business into something closer to an asset finance platform. That’s where the risk moves too, because you end up underwriting somebody else’s operational discipline rather than your own.

🎧 How a $7B Bank Out-Loaned Chase, and What Fintech Policy Needs Now, with AFC’s Phil Goldfeder, Fintech Layer Cake (August 11)

Goldfeder runs the American Fintech Council and was at Cross River through the PPP years, and he’s good here on how policy actually gets created, which is in rooms rather than in filings. I’ve spent more time than I’d admit on this sort of policy work in Australia, and it’s well worth a listen.

🎧 Building Brokerage 2.0: Direct Indexing and Tax Alpha with Mo Al Adham, Founders in Arms (August 14)

Al Adham runs Frec, which has pulled direct indexing and tax loss harvesting down out of the family office and into a retail brokerage. He’s good with Immad Akhund and Rajat Suri on how the tax alpha actually works, who it’s for, and why the most expensive product on the platform is also the fastest growing. Add this one to your playlist.

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🙏 What did you think of this week’s issue of FR?

I Love It! ◌ I Like It ◌ Not Bad ◌ I Don’t Like It ◌ It’s Awful

If you’re new, here is a breakdown of what you can expect from each issue.

If you missed our recent editions, you can catch up here. Some previous issues you might want to check out if you’re new include “A Deep Dive Into The Cash App’s Growth Machine”, “The Future Of Payment Initiation”, and “Current: Doing It Differently”.

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🤖 Cloudflare gives AI agents an identity and a wallet, Fortune

🏃 The Rundown: Cloudflare announced Cloudflare Wallets and cloudflare.pay last week during its Agents Week. Account holders get an Account Wallet holding stablecoins, and can issue Virtual Wallets to individual agents that spend through API keys within limits the owner sets. Payments run over x402, the open protocol Coinbase originated. Currently handle reservations are live, and the product is the buy-side counterpart to the Monetization Gateway Cloudflare announced in July, which lets sites charge agents per request.

🥡 Takeaway: Everything is fintech... eventually. Every technology company is ultimately tempted into making a payments play, and it all too often follows a similar pattern. Money flows in around the business as it continues to grow and one day someone works out that none of that is being monetised, and poof, a payments product suddenly appears. Most of the time the fit is poor and the thing reads as a line item somebody needed for a board deck rather than a product the company had any right to build.

This one might be the rare case where timing and the market had more to say than a simple “let’s get some of that action”. In Cloudflare’s case, it sits in front of a very large share of the web’s traffic (like a very large share), and what it has always sold is deciding what happens to a request before it reaches a server. Charging for a request, and funding the software making the request, are the same shape of problem as the one it already solves. Nobody had to invent a reason for Cloudflare to be here, but the timing, with agent payment standards starting to take shape, was likely a decisive factor for them to act.

By Agent Economy’s count, x402 has settled roughly 160 million payments worth about $41 million to date, which works out at something like 26 cents each. An enormous number of tiny payments for API calls, inference and data, and nothing that would trouble a mid-sized processor. Let’s be clear: it’s still very early. Historically, micropayments have failed on the consumer web for thirty years because a human will not stop to make a decision worth 26 cents. Agents have no such problem.

Serving both sides is the interesting part. Monetization Gateway prices the request, Wallets funds the buyer, and Cloudflare’s network is the thing deciding whether the bot request gets through at all. Two-sided markets tend to die in the gap where neither side turns up first, and building both ends yourself is the standard way through it, because you can seed one side until the other bothers to show up. I’d also guess they are not yet certain which side is the valuable one, and owning both is a reasonable way to put off having to decide, and a handy bootstrapping mechanism for the whole segment.

My guess is this settles into two separate markets rather than one. The card networks and Stripe are building agentic checkout for the case where an agent buys something a human would have bought, with a card and a chargeback sitting behind it. x402 is for the case where software pays software for a resource nobody would ever have opened a browser for. The consumer end is where all the action is at the moment (e.g. agents acting for humans buying tickets to concerts etc.). The machine-to-machine end is where I would expect the transaction count to end up, and Cloudflare has quietly decided to build for that future.

🏦 Plaid and Sierra put a bank account inside the agent, Sierra

🏃 The Rundown: Plaid and Sierra announced a partnership last week that lets AI agents built on Sierra ask a customer for permission to connect their bank account inside a conversation, then use that data to carry the job forward without the customer leaving the chat. Sierra launched its Horizon agents in July, built to pursue long-running goals such as originating a loan or settling an insurance claim across multiple sessions. Sierra says the agents run compliance checks with defined points for a human to step in.

🥡 Takeaway: It seems Plaid is going deep on agents. I covered the first half of this back in issue #160, when OpenAI put a PFM experience inside ChatGPT and every one of those account connections ran through Plaid, across more than 12,000 institutions. That one was read-only. Connect your bank, your cards and your brokerage, then ask the model questions about your own money, which is roughly what a standalone PFM app used to do with a great deal more engineering. Sierra is the same piping but with a more B2B use case in mind.

Where the ChatGPT version answered questions, Sierra’s agents are trying to get a job done. A borrower who does not clear on credit score alone gets their cash flow reviewed inside the application rather than waiting for someone to pull statements. A claim that stalls on a bank detail keeps moving. The customer is also not sent off to a portal and told to come back, because Plaid Link surfaces inside the conversation itself, and anyone who has watched drop-off rates on a redirect knows what that is worth.

Plaid spent a decade as the connection between a budgeting app or a lender and somebody’s bank account, and the value sat in bank coverage nobody else wanted to go and build. That coverage has not changed. What changed is who needs it. Every agent that wants to do anything useful with a person’s money needs the same plumbing, and Plaid arrives with ten years of experience deep in the pipes. Bloomberg reported in July that it has been holding early talks about a US IPO, and whenever that lands, the story it tells will be about agents rather than just open banking. How times have changed.

💼 Monzo tops one million business accounts, Finextra

🏃 The Rundown: Monzo passed one million business customers last week, which it says makes it the first British digital bank to reach that number. Monzo Business launched in 2020, and the customer count has doubled in the past two years. One in six UK businesses now banks with Monzo, rising to one in five newly formed businesses. More firms used the Current Account Switch Service to move to Monzo during 2025 than to any other business bank.

🥡 Takeaway: A business current account is a sticky product. It is wired into the accounting software, the payroll run, the card terminal and a decade of direct debits, and the pain of moving it usually swamps whatever you save. Barclays, HSBC, NatWest and Lloyds have leaned on that inertia for a very long time. But when a founder decides enough is enough and/or the economics bend, businesses move.

Business banking behaves very differently from the consumer side in that respect. Consumer banking runs on brand, habit and whoever your parents banked with. A business will move if you show it a better outcome, because the person deciding is the same person doing the bookkeeping at nine on a Sunday night. Monzo has spent the past year putting a tax pot, a built-in tax filing tool and sole trader pensions with Inclusive Money into that account. Very little of it is banking. It is the admin around running a small business, which is the job the customer is trying to finish.

One in five newly formed businesses is the figure I would be staring at if I ran the SME business at one of the Big Four in the UK. Companies that start with you and grow tend to stay, so losing the formation moment is expensive in a way that takes years to show up. It has not hurt the incumbents yet, because a two-year-old company with £4,000 in the account is not where their revenue comes from, and Monzo pointing the whole company at this after walking away from the US earlier in the year suggests it knows exactly what it wants to rally around.

Having said all this, it’s worth noting a million business accounts is not necessarily a million valuable ones. A large share will be sole traders and micro-businesses with thin balances and no borrowing, while the incumbent franchise sits in lending to established SMEs and the deposits that come with it. Monzo has the licence and the deposit base to move up into that, and I could see it happening, though taking real SME credit risk in a soft UK economy is a very different business from selling tax pots.

🌎 Nu México switches on as a bank, The Rio Times

🏃 The Rundown: Nu México began operating as a full bank last week, completing its conversion from a Sofipo to a banco múltiple after a technical migration the evening before. Mexico’s CNBV granted the final operating authorisation in July, roughly three years after Nubank applied. More than 15 million customers moved across, and deposit protection rose from around 225,000 pesos under the Sofipo scheme to about 3.5 million pesos under IPAB. Nu says it is now the largest digital bank in the country and will stay branchless. Payroll accounts and a wider credit offering are next.

🥡 Takeaway: In Mexico the nómina account is how a bank gets anchored to a customer (as is the case in all markets), and the incumbents have owned that channel for decades through employer relationships nobody has managed to prise open. A Sofipo could not offer one. Nu can now, and it arrives at the starting line with 15 million people already using it for something else.

The deposit insurance change is also good news. Going from roughly 225,000 pesos of cover to about 3.5 million changes what a person is willing to leave sitting in the account. That’s the line between where you keep your spending money and where you keep your actual savings, and Nu has spent seven years on the wrong side of it.

Three years from application to switch-on, and every market has its own version of that queue. The length of it is precisely why nobody has walked in and taken payroll off BBVA or Banorte before now. Nubank has said it thinks the Mexican business can eventually reach the size of the Brazilian one and that the focus is on becoming the primary banking relationship for as many Mexican customers as possible. Primary relationship in Mexico means the salary lands with you.

The branchless part is the bit I am curious about. Every incumbent still runs branches partly because payroll has historically involved an employer, a corporate banker and a great deal of paper. It’s a bet on where things are headed in the market, and time will tell if it works the way they think it will.

💸 Western Union launches Stablecard with Rain, Western Union

🏃 The Rundown: Western Union launched Stablecard last week with the stablecoin infrastructure player Rain, pairing a digital wallet with a Visa secured credit card. Customers receive Western Union transfers directly as USDPT, the company’s dollar stablecoin, and spend the balance anywhere Visa is accepted. USDPT is issued by Anchorage Digital Bank on Solana and redeems 1:1 for dollars. Stablecard is live in 37 markets including Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and the Philippines, with more than 60 targeted by the end of the year.

🥡 Takeaway: A fortnight ago Western Union was winding down the European digital bank it launched in 2022. Now it is handing out a dollar wallet and a Visa card across 37 emerging markets. Those two things look like more or less the same product, but when you pull back the strategy and execution curtains they’re not the same business at all.

The European version made Western Union the bank. The money sat on its own balance sheet under its own Austrian licence, with deposit protection, capital requirements and a supervisor attached. The job that account was doing was turning a remittance customer into a current account holder: salary in, bills out, a card, somewhere to save. A deep relationship, slow to build and expensive to run, and the payoff only arrives once the customer treats you as their main bank.

Stablecard does none of that. Western Union is not the issuer, since USDPT comes from Anchorage Digital Bank, and it is not the card infrastructure either, since Rain supplies the wallet. The value sits in a token somebody else mints, against reserves somebody else holds, spent on a card somebody else issues. Western Union brings the brand, the corridors and the customer. No balance sheet exposure, no deposit insurance, no net interest income. The money comes from interchange and the spread, which is roughly the business Western Union was already in.

The difference feels marginal from the outside and is anything but. The bank wanted to be the place your salary landed. Stablecard only wants to be where the money sits between arriving and being spent, which for someone receiving a remittance in Buenos Aires or Manila is the job that actually needs doing. Nobody there is going to pay for groceries in USDPT. They are going to tap a card that settles from a USDPT balance, at a merchant who never learns any of this happened, and Solana is plumbing, which is generally where a blockchain has to end up before it is any use to a normal person.

The Defiant counted about $7.4 million of USDPT in circulation across 162 addresses on the day Stablecard launched, which is a rounding error against the volume Western Union moves. The product is also described as a secured credit card without much explanation of the credit mechanics, the limits or the fees, and I would want to see the pricing before deciding the receiver comes out ahead. The direction is right regardless. A dozen fintechs across Latin America and Africa have already built dollar accounts for people whose currency is sliding, and Western Union is late to it, but it turns up with the agent network, the corridors, and the person on the receiving end already in its records. Looking at the pieces they’ve assembled, this feels right, but let’s see how they execute it as a “legacy” brand.

💰 Rivo raises $3.1M and comes out of beta, Rivo

🏃 The Rundown: Rivo came out of beta last week alongside a $2.7 million seed round, taking total funding to $3.1 million. Backers include South Park Commons, Wisdom Ventures, Script Capital, 645 Ventures and 20VC, with former Nubank chief product officer Jag Duggal joining as an angel and advisor. Founded in 2025 by Ambrish Tyagi, previously at Cruise, Rivo connects to a customer’s existing checking account, moves idle cash into short-term US Treasuries through its banking partner Jiko, and returns it before the bills fall due.

🥡 Takeaway: PFM apps have spent fifteen years telling people things they already knew. Rivo does the thing instead. Tyagi’s line is that recommendation engines tell you what to do and Rivo just does it, which is the right instinct for a category that has never managed to turn insight into action. He came to this from Cruise and calls it self-driving money, which is a line borrowed from the last job but also a fair description of the product. You set it up once and it moves your money around without asking again.

Rivo’s own site puts its yield at about 3.7% against an average checking account at 0.07%, and This Week in Fintech reports the fee at five basis points a month on average daily balance. Call it 60 basis points a year, so roughly a sixth of the yield it generates. A legible price for a real service, which is more than you can say for the interchange-and-hope model most consumer fintechs launch on. It is also quietly taking deposits out of banks while leaving the account open. The customer keeps their bank, their card and their direct debits, and the balance that made the relationship profitable goes to Treasuries.

Sweep accounts have done a version of this for decades and almost nobody uses one, which is the inertia Rivo has named and is charging to solve. Whether people are comfortable letting something move their money around for them is the question this category always runs into, and it is not really a yes or no. Some will set it up and never look again. Plenty will not, at any price, however good the maths. The question is what the size of that market is, and maybe more importantly what’s going to be the catalyst for that number to rise (at venture scale).

💰 Moment raises a $22M Series A, FinTech Futures

🏃 The Rundown: Cape Town’s Moment announced a $22 million Series A last week led by AlphaCode Venture Partners, with returning investors General Catalyst and MultiChoice and a first cheque from Canal+. Set up in 2023 as a joint venture between MultiChoice, Rapyd and General Catalyst, Moment builds payment collection and revenue retention tools for enterprise merchants across Africa, and says it processes around 600,000 transactions a day. Total funding is now $55 million.

🥡 Takeaway: The product is failed payments. Abandoned carts, debit orders that bounce, subscriptions that lapse because the collection did not go through on the day. In markets where a meaningful share of recurring payments fail on the first attempt, the money is in the retry logic and the recovery flow rather than anything happening at the checkout.

MultiChoice built it because it lives with the problem. A pay-TV business running across a couple of dozen African markets is, operationally, a debit order collections business with content attached, and a few points of collection rate is most of the margin. Building the thing you need yourself and then selling it to everyone with the same problem is an old and reliable way to start a payments company.

🎧 Mastercard’s Marc Pettican on the road to a $17.4 trillion virtual card market, Tearsheet (August 5)

Pettican runs corporate solutions at Mastercard and gets into why virtual cards keep growing in B2B, how you balance network economics when the buyer wants the float and the supplier resents the fee, and where the multi-rail story goes from here. Well worth a listen.

🎧 A New Intelligence Layer for Community Lenders with Mike de Vere, CEO of Zest AI, Fintech One-on-One (August 6)

De Vere has spent two decades putting machine learning into credit underwriting, and this one is good on what actually changes inside a community lender once the old scorecard comes out. Add this one to your playlist.

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🙏 What did you think of this week’s issue of FR?

I Love It! ◌ I Like It ◌ Not Bad ◌ I Don’t Like It ◌ It’s Awful

If you’re new, here is a breakdown of what you can expect from each issue.

If you missed our recent editions, you can catch up here. Some previous issues you might want to check out if you’re new include “A Deep Dive Into The Cash App’s Growth Machine”, “The Future Of Payment Initiation”, and “Current: Doing It Differently”.

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🏦 Increase buys itself a bank, Banking Dive

🏃 The Rundown: Increase, the banking infrastructure company founded by early Stripe employee Darragh Buckley, launched Increase Bank last week. It’s a rebuilt Twin City Bank, a single-branch community lender in Longview, Washington, which Buckley took full control of after the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco approved his purchase of the holding company’s voting shares in June 2025. The bank holds about $114 million in assets and the Longview branch carries on under the Twin City name. Increase says companies including Stripe, Ramp and Gusto move more than $500 billion a year across its infrastructure, and its existing sponsor partners Grasshopper, First Internet Bank of Indiana and Core Bank stay in place alongside the new bank.

🥡 Takeaway: “Why don’t you just buy a bank?” has been kicking around fintech for years, usually asked by someone who has recently been quoted a sponsor bank’s pricing. You can, and a few people have, but it’s rather like buying a vintage car. Wonderful in principle, then you meet the oil leaks and work out that realistically you get to drive it about twice a month.

A bank arrives with examiners, capital ratios, a BSA program, a board that has to be fit and proper, and a supervisory relationship. All great until you need to rebuild the core, and all of a sudden that charter you bought sets the ceiling on what the engineering team is allowed to ship. Buckley likely knows this better than most. When he first bought into Twin City last year he told TechCrunch the bank shouldn’t support sponsor banking at all, because “only specialized banks should do it”. He then spent a year building the specialised bank rather than bending a community one into the job, and the Longview branch still serves the customers it always had.

This has shades of Jackie Reses buying Kansas City’s Lead Bank in 2022 for around $56 million, and of William Hockey buying a single-branch lender in Chico before relaunching it as Column. Find a small, clean community charter, buy the holding company, leave the branch alone, rebuild everything behind it.

What Buckley is buying is the Federal Reserve master account (i.e. direct access to settlement). Twin City has one, so Increase has one, and its connections to the Fed, The Clearing House and Visa now sit under its own core instead of behind somebody else’s. That also collapses the middleware layer that broke in Synapse, where the ledger lived at one company and the money at another (the classic issue that every neobank has to deal with). Direct access to the pipes rather than the rented version is the actual game in fintech, and master accounts are the part of it that money alone doesn’t buy.

Zooming out, the direction of travel this year has been de novo. Circle finished its national trust charter this month, Klarna has applied, and there’s a queue behind them at the OCC. Buying is the older and less fashionable route, and it comes with someone else’s legacy attached, oil leaks and all. It also gets you a master account without the wait, which is why it keeps happening.

💸 X Money starts rolling out in the US, TechCrunch

🏃 The Rundown: X began rolling out X Money to US Premium and Premium+ subscribers last week, following an invite-only beta. The product bundles a deposit account, peer-to-peer payments and a Visa debit card inside the X app, with deposits held at Cross River Bank and insured to $250,000. Premium+ subscribers get up to 6% APY, Premium subscribers reach the same rate by linking a direct deposit, and card purchases earn up to 3% cash back. Every user gets a virtual card that works with Apple Wallet and can order a physical metal card showing their name or X handle. There is no crypto in the launch build.

🥡 Takeaway: Two years of X Money being three months away, and here it actually is. I’ve covered the Smart Cashtags version and the April launch that didn’t happen. This one is a shipping product with an FDIC-insured account behind it.

No funding cost supports 6% APY plus 3% cash back. It’s a customer acquisition number, paid for out of a subscription business and gated behind Premium at $8 a month or Premium+ at $40. The deposits are there to make the subscription harder to cancel. That’s a different product from Venmo or Cash App, and partially explains why the rollout is subscriber-only rather than switched on for every account.

They built on Cross River rather than chasing a charter of their own, which sort of feels a little less like Elon than I’d expect. After all, even Palmer Luckey went and got a charter. Come on, Elon, be more ambitious!

What X Money doesn’t have yet is a reason to move your primary relationship across. Uber Money had distribution too. The thing that makes a wallet stick is direct deposit, and X is clearly aiming straight at it, since the 6% rate for ordinary Premium subscribers is conditional on exactly that. Whether people will route their salary through a social network is the open question, and I honestly don’t know how that lands. The audience most likely to try it first is also the audience most likely to have strong views about who owns the app.

📈 ICE buys MarketAxess for $6 billion, Intercontinental Exchange

🏃 The Rundown: Intercontinental Exchange agreed last week to acquire MarketAxess for $167 a share in cash, a 33% premium, valuing the equity at roughly $6 billion and the enterprise at about $5.7 billion. MarketAxess operates electronic trading platforms for global institutional fixed income. ICE is funding the deal entirely with newly issued debt and expects $100 million in annual run-rate expense synergies. Both boards approved it unanimously, and it is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval.

🥡 Takeaway: Equities went electronic decades ago and the economics settled into thin margins, enormous volume and a handful of venues. Corporate bonds never fully made that trip. A meaningful chunk of institutional fixed income still runs on voice and chat, and MarketAxess has been trying to drag it onto a screen since 2000.

ICE already owns the New York Stock Exchange and a large fixed income data and index business. MarketAxess brings the institutional trading venue. Putting them together is a bet that the last manual corner of a very large market is finally about to give, and that whoever owns the venue when it does gets the data business that comes with it.

At roughly 10.6x EBITDA after full synergies, ICE has decided the platform is worth more inside its stack than MarketAxess could reach on its own. That’s usually what you see when a standalone venue has proved the demand but can’t fund the distribution to finish the job.

Once it closes, ICE will hold the exchange, the mortgage technology, the fixed income data and the venue where the bonds actually trade. On that mix the exchange is close to the least important part, and the real product is the infrastructure sitting underneath everything else.

⚖️ New York sues Kalshi over an “illegal gambling operation”, CNBC

🏃 The Rundown: New York’s attorney general Letitia James filed a petition in Manhattan state court last week alleging that Kalshi runs an illegal, unlicensed gambling operation, having never obtained a New York State Gaming Commission licence. The state wants a permanent injunction, restitution to users and penalties of three times Kalshi’s gains, which the filing puts at a minimum of $36 billion pending a full accounting. It also objects to Kalshi accepting 18 to 20 year olds when the state floor for mobile sports betting is 21. James filed near-identical petitions against Coinbase Financial Markets and Gemini Titan in April, and the CFTC has since sought a temporary restraining order to halt the state’s case. Days earlier, brokerage tastytrade launched its own CFTC-regulated prediction markets on Apex Fintech Solutions’ turnkey infrastructure.

🥡 Takeaway: Back in April, when New York went after Coinbase and Gemini, the read here was that the whole category had been built on regulatory ambiguity rather than regulatory clarity, and that the underlying question had only been postponed. It is now being asked properly, and New York has put $36 billion behind the asking.

That figure sits against a company reportedly valued at $22 billion, so this is a shutdown demand dressed as a penalty. Whether the state gets anywhere near it is another matter, and the CFTC moving for a restraining order against a state attorney general tells you this has stopped being about Kalshi and become a straight federal-versus-state jurisdiction fight. Kalshi’s position has always been that event contracts are federally regulated derivatives and states have no say. New York’s position is that calling a bet a derivative doesn’t stop it being a bet.

None of which has slowed anyone down, and Robinhood’s Q2 numbers explain why. Event contracts brought in $156 million of transaction revenue for the quarter, ahead of both stocks at $129 million and crypto at $100 million, and they did it on $6.8 billion of contracts traded against $956 billion of stock. Sheel Mohnot worked out the take rates (see tweet below): about $23 of Robinhood revenue per $1,000 traded on prediction markets, against $2.50 on crypto, $1.47 on options and 13 cents on stocks. The options and event-contract figures rest on assumed average contract prices, so hold the exact ratios loosely. The order of magnitude is what is worth noticing here.

That is why the infrastructure turned up before the law did. Apex has built turnkey rails so a brokerage can switch prediction markets on without standing up its own futures clearing, and tastytrade is the first to use it, after Robinhood and moomoo got there their own way. A category monetising at something like 170 times stocks gets productised long before the courts catch up.

Others have listed Fed decisions, CPI, nonfarm payrolls, the VIX and crude. Macro contracts, not sports. Almost everything New York is angry about is sports betting and under-21 access, so the macro end of the category looks a great deal more defensible than the sports end. My guess is that’s where this eventually divides, though I’ve been wrong about regulatory outcomes before and the CFTC action could make the whole question moot. A super fascinated story on a few different fronts.

🏦 Western Union is shutting its digital bank, FinTech Futures

🏃 The Rundown: Western Union is discontinuing Western Union Digital Bank, its European digital banking service, with all accounts closing two months after each customer receives their individual closure notice. Launched in 2022 and operated by Western Union International Bank in Austria, it offered IBAN current accounts, savings, debit cards, multicurrency wallets and recurring payments across markets including Germany, Italy, Poland and Romania. The company said the decision followed a routine review of its products. The core money transfer business is unaffected. Austria’s regulator recently fined the bank about €42,000 over reporting breaches under DORA.

🥡 Takeaway: While a queue of fintechs is working very hard to get chartered, a 175-year-old company that already held a European banking licence has decided it doesn’t want to run a bank on top of it. Surprise, surprise.

You can see why they tried. Western Union has the remittance customer, very often a migrant worker sending money home, and that’s precisely the person a local high-street bank serves badly. Turning them from a transaction into an account holder is the obvious play, and it broadly makes sense. Wise and Revolut built real businesses on the idea. The catch is that remittance and banking are different businesses with different shapes. A remittance customer turns up when they need to send money and you earn on the spread. A transactional relationship. A current account customer needs onboarding, support, fraud cover, deposit protection and a reason to keep their salary with you, and the revenue per customer stays thin until they do. A much deeper relationship that needs time to pay off.

Four years is not a long run at it, and the DORA fine hints that operating a regulated bank in Austria was absorbing more attention than the product was giving back.

Western Union hasn’t said what happens to the Austrian banking licence itself, and that’s the detail I’m sort of interested in. A European banking licence with nothing attached to it is a valuable thing to be holding at the moment.

💰 LemonEdge raises a $21M Series A, Finextra

🏃 The Rundown: London’s LemonEdge announced a $21 million Series A last week, led by Blackstone Innovations Investments with BNY joining and existing investor Sidekick Partners participating. Founded in 2020 by Gareth Hewitt and Jamie Nascimento, LemonEdge builds fund accounting software for private markets and says its clients manage more than $2.5 trillion. The round takes total funding past $30 million and will fund expansion across the US and Europe.

🥡 Takeaway: Private markets have grown enormously over the past decade while the accounting underneath them has mostly not. A lot of fund administration still runs on overnight batch jobs, so a secondary transfer or a restructuring doesn’t show up in the accounting model until the next morning, and anything the system can’t handle gets pushed into a spreadsheet. LemonEdge processes ownership changes as they happen, which it reckons takes a quarterly close from something like 90 days to 30.

Unglamorous, and that’s rather the point. This is the system of record for how much of a fund somebody owns, and once it’s in nobody rips it out casually. Hence a $21 million Series A sitting underneath clients who run $2.5 trillion.

💰 Freehand raises $75M for supply chain spend agents, FinTech Futures

🏃 The Rundown: Freehand announced a $75 million Series B last week, co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with PSP Growth and Nexus Venture Partners participating. The San Francisco company builds AI agents that run supply chain spend for large enterprises and came out of stealth in February. The round takes total funding to $100 million.

🥡 Takeaway: Most of the agentic payments money this year has gone to the consumer end. Checkout standards, agent wallets, identity for machines. Freehand is at the other end of the pipe, where agents read a contract, check whether an invoice matches what was actually agreed, negotiate the difference with the supplier and then pay it. Meta, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Cardinal Health are named customers, and the company says it moves billions across 60 to 70 countries without a human in the loop.

That’s a considerably larger amount of trust than anyone is currently extending to an agent at a checkout, and accounts payable is a sensible place to put it. High volume, rule-bound, and the failure mode is an overpayment you can claw back rather than a customer you’ve lost. Freehand’s own numbers on spend recovery aren’t independently audited, so take them as the company’s. But the first agents genuinely trusted with corporate money have shown up in the least glamorous corner of finance, which is usually where this sort of thing starts.

🎧 Lessons From Backing The Best Founders In Fintech, Founders (August 2)

Micky Malka was early into Revolut, Robinhood, Nubank and Coinbase, and he traces a straight line from the branchless bank he nearly went broke building in Brazil in his twenties to OnePay with Walmart two decades later. Well worth a listen.

🎧 Why Card-Linked Installments is a Better Form of BNPL With Nandan Sheth, CEO of Splitit, Fintech One-on-One (July 30)

Sheth makes the case for running instalments on a customer’s existing card line rather than originating new credit each time, which is a genuinely different model from the one most BNPL players run. Add this one to your playlist.

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🙏 What did you think of this week’s issue of FR?

I Love It! ◌ I Like It ◌ Not Bad ◌ I Don’t Like It ◌ It’s Awful

If you’re new, here is a breakdown of what you can expect from each issue.

If you missed our recent editions, you can catch up here. Some previous issues you might want to check out if you’re new include “A Deep Dive Into The Cash App’s Growth Machine”, “The Future Of Payment Initiation”, and “Current: Doing It Differently”.

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🤖 Stripe is in talks to buy OpenRouter for around $10B, The Wall Street Journal

🏃 The Rundown: The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Stripe is in talks to acquire OpenRouter, the marketplace that lets developers reach hundreds of AI models through a single API, in a deal that could value it at around $10 billion. OpenRouter raised a $113 million Series B led by CapitalG in May at a $1.3 billion valuation. Stripe already handles OpenRouter’s invoicing, tax and fraud tooling. The talks are preliminary, other bidders have circled, and no agreement has been announced.

🥡 Takeaway: Last week they were circling PayPal and this week it’s OpenRouter. What’s going on? From the outside it looks like some combination of buying growth and hunting for new revenue streams.

OpenRouter was marked at $1.3 billion back in May and is now reportedly worth about eight times that, which is a fairly heroic re-rating for ten weeks’ work. I doubt much has changed inside the business in that time, so what’s being paid for is the position itself, with a bit on top because a few other people were apparently sniffing around.

What they’d actually be buying is the routing layer, which sits between developers and the labs deciding which model handles which request, and therefore gets a view of pricing, latency and what everyone is really spending across the market. Stripe already has the meter on that pipe because it does OpenRouter’s billing, so owning the router as well is a familiar move for them: round up a few hundred providers who all price differently and behave differently, and hide the mess behind a single API. Card acquiring, then tax, then treasury, now this.

Stripe has spent the best part of a decade describing the job as increasing the GDP of the internet, which is a conveniently elastic thing to have written down. It’s a big enough tent to cover a model router sitting underneath a large slice of new software spend. Which says less about OpenRouter, I think, than about how much wider they’re now drawing the line around their own business.

None of this is signed, of course, and Databricks had a look of its own, so the whole thing could still fall over. Doing it while also sitting in a syndicate bidding $53 billion for PayPal is a fair bit of appetite for one private company, even one valued at $159 billion. Clearly the corp dev team at Stripe are keeping busy.

📱 Apple hands its device financing to Klarna, TechCrunch

🏃 The Rundown: Bloomberg reported last week that Apple is launching Apple Upgrade, a US lease-to-own program covering most iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch models, with Klarna providing the financing. Terms run 24 months for iPhone and Apple Watch and 36 months for Mac and iPad, with a soft credit check at sign-up. Customers can pay off early, upgrade mid-term, or return the device at the end. Apple will stop taking new sign-ups for the iPhone Upgrade Program it has run since 2015. The program is due to go live on 28 July.

🥡 Takeaway: Apple put prices up across the Mac and iPad lines in June, blamed the cost of memory, and most people expect the iPhone to follow when the new one lands in September. So they’re asking customers to pay more at more or less the same moment they start offering a way not to pay it all at once. Leasing doesn’t make a phone any cheaper, but it does shift the conversation from the sticker price to a monthly number, which is a much easier conversation to be having when the sticker is heading north.

That’s a bit of a reversal for a company that has historically been fairly relaxed about asking people to find $1,500. Apple has run a version of this since 2015 with the iPhone Upgrade Program, but the new one stretches across Macs, iPads and Watches, and it’s pointed squarely at the premium end of the lineup where the increases will bite hardest. It reads to me less like a financing product and more like a way of protecting the upgrade cycle from Apple’s own pricing.

For Klarna this is the motherlode, and about as much distribution as exists in consumer hardware. Apple’s stores and online channel put it in front of a volume of customers it could not buy at any price, and the paper looks rather better than what it usually writes, given a leased device comes with a residual value, a return path and a customer who has passed a credit check. That’s a different animal to a $60 order of trainers split four ways.

Whether it’s a good trade is a separate question, and Goldman is the obvious cautionary tale. It issued the Apple Card from 2019, lost well north of a billion on the card itself and several billion more across the consumer push it belonged to, collected a CFPB penalty and a ban on new card products in 2024, and eventually handed the portfolio to Chase at a reported discount of around a billion. Apple kept the halo and the customer relationship the whole way through. Not everything with an Apple logo on it turns to gold for the partner carrying the balance sheet.

🏦 Revolut becomes a bank in Australia, Australian Financial Review

🏃 The Rundown: APRA granted Revolut Payments Australia an unrestricted authorised deposit-taking institution licence last week, and Revolut Bank Australia opened the same day. More than a million existing retail and business customers move across automatically, with eligible deposits now covered by the Financial Claims Scheme up to $250,000. It’s Revolut’s fourth full banking licence after Lithuania, the UK and Mexico, and its first in Asia-Pacific. Separately, Revolut confirmed a secondary share sale at a $115 billion valuation, up from $75 billion last November.

🥡 Takeaway: It’s been a tough rid for all those who have tried to build a challenger bank in Australia. Go straight at the ADI licence and the capital tends to get you before the lending does, which is roughly the story of Xinja in 2020 and Volt in 2022, after which APRA narrowed the door further by insisting new entrants launch a real lending product and hold the greater of nine months’ costs or $15 million before it hands over an unrestricted licence. Ride someone else’s licence instead and you tend not to graduate. Up has been running on Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s ADI since 2018 and never got one of its own, and Bendigo eventually bought Ferocia outright in 2021. Even 86 400, which did win its own licence in 2019, was inside NAB by the middle of 2021. Judo is the exception, and even then it got there as an SME lender with a relationship model rather than a consumer bank — and has faced its own challenges as a listed. Everyone else either ran out of money or ended up owned by one of the incumbents they meant to compete with.

Revolut has been quietly plugging away at this market since 2020, building a base of more than a million customers. What the ADI gives it is control of the pipes: deposits in its own name, direct access to settlement, and the economics that come with both. It doesn’t rent any of that from a partner any more, which is the part that changes the business rather than the marketing.

None of which solves the bit everyone underestimates, which is that the Big Four still hold the overwhelming majority of primary banking relationships in this country and those have proved fairly resistant to a better rate. Revolut’s Australian customers have mostly treated it as a travel card sitting alongside a real bank, and shifting that to salary-lands-here is a different exercise entirely. What Revolut has that the others didn’t is the licence, the balance sheet and the patience to keep at it for a decade. Let’s see how they fare.

📈 Chime adds investing to the app, Chime

🏃 The Rundown: Chime launched Chime Invest last week, adding commission-free stock and ETF trading inside its banking app alongside managed portfolios run by Atomic Invest, an SEC-registered adviser. There are no account minimums and members can start from $1. Management fees on the managed portfolios are nil for Chime Prime members, 0.10% for Plus and 0.25% for everyone else. Access rolls out to members over the coming weeks.

🥡 Takeaway: There is nothing especially novel about a banking app adding share trading in 2026, which is more or less the point. Cash App added stocks back in 2019, SoFi has had it for about as long, N26 pushed stocks and ETFs across a dozen European markets in 2024, and Monzo got there last year with a handful of iShares ETFs. Once every competitor has an investing tab, not having one starts looking like a gap.

Another way (the more conventional way) to read it is as a hunt for sticky activity. Spending is transactional and mostly invisible, and a debit card is about as easy a thing to walk away from as exists in financial services, whereas a portfolio is something people check far more often than is good for them. Did those SpaceX shares finally go up? That gives customers a reason to open the app on days they aren’t buying anything, and moving it elsewhere means transfers, paperwork and tax records rather than updating a card number. The price points suggest the same thing, with nil for Prime members, 0.10% for Plus and 0.25% for everyone else, so the cheapest way to invest happens to be making Chime your main account. Whether a base that skews towards people earning under $100,000 a year takes it up is the open question, but as a way of keeping people inside the app it’s a reasonable bet.

💸 Washington puts a tariff on Pix, USTR

🏃 The Rundown: A 25% US tariff on most Brazilian goods took effect last week, following a year-long Section 301 investigation. Among the six categories of Brazilian conduct the USTR found unreasonable is electronic payment services, where it argues Brazil has disadvantaged US payment companies through policies favouring Pix, the central bank’s instant payment system. The finding cites the rule requiring institutions with more than 500,000 active accounts to offer Pix free to individuals. Brazil has said it will invoke its Economic Reciprocity Law.

🥡 Takeaway: Section 301 has historically been aimed at intellectual property theft, subsidies and market access. Pointing it at another country’s domestic payment rail is new, and the precedent matters more than the tariff does. Pix is used by more than 90% of Brazilian adults and now carries more transactions in Brazil than credit and debit cards combined. It was built by the central bank, it’s free for individuals, and it settles instantly. Card volumes went where you’d expect.

The complaint is worth a read, because it isn’t quite the usual market-access argument. Participation in Pix is open, and US-connected firms can and do take part. What the USTR is objecting to is that a free, instant, state-run default compressed the economics that card networks rely on. Sitting underneath the trade language is an uncomfortable question about what happens when public infrastructure simply works better than the private alternative, and there isn’t a clean answer to it in trade law. Fascinating.

Some caution is warranted on how much of this is really a payments action. The same 25% tariff bundles the payments complaint together with ethanol market access, deforestation, intellectual property, preferential tariffs, and Brazilian court orders against US platforms. Six grievances, one blunt instrument, applied to coffee and machinery. Reading it as a fight about instant payments likely overstates things. But regardless, it’s a fascinating matter and well worth keeping an eye on.

💰 Natural raises $30M to build payments rails for AI agents, PR Newswire

🏃 The Rundown: San Francisco’s Natural announced a $30 million Series A last week, led by Kirsten Green at Forerunner, taking total funding past $40 million. The company was 193 days old at close. It also made six products generally available, including FDIC-insured wallets for agents held through Column, one-way vault accounts, and payment, request and transfer primitives.

🥡 Takeaway: Natural’s pitch is that it has built the primitives itself rather than wrapping someone else’s, and that’s true up to a point. The ledger, the money movement and the agent identity work are its own, but the wallets sit on Column, so the regulated floor is rented much like everyone else’s. Not a knock, just worth being precise about where the building actually stops.

The more interesting problem is the one underneath it. Chargebacks, disputes and identity all assume a human who can be asked what happened, and machine-speed volume with nobody in the loop breaks that model rather than stretching it. Rebuilding the dispute layer is a much harder job than issuing agents a card. Whether agent payment volume ever turns up at the scale we all think it will is still an open question. But as I’ve said before, this is the hottest segment in payments and is only going to keep drawing in more capital.

💰 Augustus raises $180M at a $1B valuation, PR Newswire

🏃 The Rundown: Augustus announced a $180 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation last week, led by Tiger Global with participation from Hummingbird and QED. The New York company is building a clearing bank giving international fintechs and banks direct access to dollar accounts and rails. It received conditional approval for a US national bank charter from the OCC in May and has raised $210 million in total.

🥡 Takeaway: Correspondent banking is one of the least glamorous and most expensive parts of the system. A fintech in Lagos or Jakarta that needs dollar settlement typically reaches it through a chain of intermediaries, each taking a cut and adding a day. Augustus is trying to collapse that chain by being the chartered bank at the end of it, which is the direct-access-to-the-pipes play rather than the rented version most cross-border fintechs are stuck with.

The charter is what makes it interesting, and the deliberate choice not to issue a stablecoin is the more telling part given that they’re the new hotness. It seems like Augustus wants to be the bank sitting underneath both the traditional dollar rails and the tokenised ones (but not issuing them), rather than picking a side. That neutrality is the useful part, because customers get real dollars at a real bank and can settle with first or third parties in either form, wires or stablecoins, without anyone having to hold an Augustus token to do it.

🎧 The Rules for Self-Driving Money, Fintech Takes (July 22)

Alex Johnson sits down with Steve Boms of FDATA North America and Dan Murphy, formerly of the CFPB, to work through what changes when AI agents stop just reading your financial data and start acting on it. They park Section 1033 for an hour and get into the harder liability and consent questions underneath. Well worth a listen.

🎧 The $70 Billion Escheatment Problem for Banks, Fintechs and Crypto, Fintech One-on-One (July 23)

Peter Renton talks to Allen Osgood of Eisen about escheatment, the process by which dormant accounts get handed to the state, and why $70 billion of it is sitting in plain sight. One of those corners of financial plumbing you don’t think about until it’s your problem. Add this one to your playlist.

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If you’re new, here is a breakdown of what you can expect from each issue.

If you missed our recent editions, you can catch up here. Some previous issues you might want to check out if you’re new include “A Deep Dive Into The Cash App’s Growth Machine”, “The Future Of Payment Initiation”, and “Current: Doing It Differently”.

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🏦 Circle Wins Final OCC Trust Charter, CNBC

🏃 The Rundown: The OCC granted Circle final approval last week to operate as a national trust bank. Circle National Trust can now custody the reserves behind USDC, more than $73 billion in circulation, and hold crypto assets for institutional clients directly under federal supervision. Shares jumped as much as 14% on the news.

🥡 Takeaway: The conditional nod came back in December. This is the version that actually counts, the charter going live, which means Circle now sits inside the US banking perimeter instead of leaning on third-party banks and custodians to hold what backs USDC.

In many ways this is the GENIUS Act playing out. The federal framework for payment stablecoins that passed nearly a year ago is what kicked this race into gear, and it requires large issuers like Circle to hold an OCC charter in the first place. So in one sense Circle is just doing what the law now demands. But it is worth remembering how far the ground has moved. Not long ago a crypto company asking the OCC for a national charter would have been shown the door. Now that door is the front door.

What sets Circle apart is that it is turning that requirement into a real advantage. Owning the charter means it finally controls its own destiny instead of running its business at the whim of third-party partner banks. Anyone who remembers USDC briefly depegging during the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, when a slice of those reserves was trapped at a failing bank, knows how real that risk was. It also keeps more of the float economics in house, because every basis point Circle was paying a partner to custody reserves was margin leaving the building. Win-win.

The banking lobby is already grumbling, calling it a “Franken-charter” that lets a crypto company do bank-like things without carrying a bank’s full obligations. There’s a point in there worth taking seriously. A trust charter is not a deposit-taking licence, and how far the OCC lets these institutions stretch is still an open question. But the direction of travel is clear. If you want to run dollars at scale in the US, you are going to end up holding a charter of some kind, and Circle now has one.

💳 Big US Banks Explore Buying Fiserv’s Debit Networks, Reuters

🏃 The Rundown: JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and PNC held early talks last week about acquiring one or both of Fiserv’s debit networks, STAR and Accel, according to the Wall Street Journal. STAR alone routes debit, ATM and e-commerce transactions for more than 2,800 institutions and 115 million cardholders. No deal has been agreed, and some of the banks have reportedly already stepped back.

🥡 Takeaway: Even as talk, this one is worth paying attention to, because it goes deep into the payment plumbing layer. The banks were reportedly circling STAR and Accel, the debit rails Fiserv has owned for years, which sit underneath a large chunk of US debit and ATM traffic.

This is about interchange. Debit interchange at the biggest banks is capped under the Durbin Amendment, but transactions routed over a bank-owned network are treated differently, so owning the rails is a way to claw back economics the caps took away. If you are JPMorgan or Bank of America moving billions of debit transactions a year, even a small change in how those get routed and priced is real money. It is the same instinct to own the pipes rather than rent them that runs through the rest of this issue, just coming from the biggest incumbents in the market.

The reason some might be backing away is the optics. A handful of the largest US banks buying the network that helps price everyone else’s debit is exactly the kind of thing that draws merchants, the Fed and antitrust regulators out of their chairs. Fiserv, for its part, would have to decide whether selling a strategic asset to its own largest customers is worth the cheque. So I would not hold my breath on a deal landing soon.

What the talks tell you, deal or no deal, is where the biggest banks think the value is heading. For a decade fintechs were the ones chipping away at the banks. Now the banks want to own the rails everyone else runs on.

🏦 Klarna Applies For A US Bank Charter, CNBC

🏃 The Rundown: Klarna applied to US federal and state regulators last week to set up Klarna Bank USA, an FDIC-backed institution chartered in Utah. It named banking executive Gary Harding as president and CEO. The move takes Klarna beyond buy now, pay later into full deposit banking.

🥡 Takeaway: Two charter stories in one issue, and they could not be more different in flavour. Circle went for a trust charter to custody reserves. Klarna is going for the real thing, a deposit-taking bank that can hold customer money and lend against it.

Klarna already runs a full bank in Europe, so it knows how to operate inside a regulator’s guardrails, and it recently started offering a US high-yield savings account through a partner bank. A charter of its own is the logical next step. The partner-bank model gets you to market fast, but you rent the economics and you inherit your sponsor’s risk appetite and their regulator’s mood. Owning the charter means Klarna keeps the deposit spread and controls its own roadmap.

The strategic logic is deposits, obviously. BNPL is a lending business, and lending businesses live and die on their cost of funding. Klarna funds a lot of its US lending through wholesale markets and partners right now. A US deposit base would give it cheaper, stickier funding, which is the same reason nearly every fintech that started in payments or credit eventually eyes a banking licence. Klarna is joining a queue full of names that began life doing one narrow thing and decided the charter was the endgame.

None of this is a done deal. A full charter is still a slog, and Klarna will be pushing it through while managing a public-market story of its own. But the striking thing is how open this path has become. Eighteen months ago a fintech applying for a US bank charter felt like a long shot, the kind of thing that stalled or quietly got withdrawn. Now Klarna, Circle and a growing queue behind them are walking through the same door, and regulators are letting them through. As more of these players win charters, they control more of the stack and more of the economics, from the deposit to the rails to the customer relationship. It will be genuinely interesting to watch how that reshapes competition, and what Klarna does with this new level of control.

📊 Equifax To Buy Mexican Credit Bureau Círculo de Crédito For $750M, Equifax

🏃 The Rundown: Equifax announced last week it will acquire Círculo de Crédito, one of Mexico’s fastest-growing credit bureaus, for an enterprise value of $750 million. Círculo’s management will stay on and move into Equifax International. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter.

🥡 Takeaway: This is the biggest clean-priced deal of the week, and it’s a US credit bureau buying its way deeper into a market where the credit-data opportunity is still wide open. Mexico has tens of millions of adults who are thin-file or invisible to formal credit, and Círculo has spent years building coverage of exactly that population.

Credit bureaus are one of the great quiet moats in finance. Once you are the place lenders check before they lend, you sit in the middle of every credit decision in the country and you compound from there. Equifax is not buying Círculo for this year’s revenue. It’s buying a position in Mexican consumer and SME credit for the next twenty years, in a market where formal lending still has a long way to grow.

It also fits a pattern running through this whole issue. Incumbents are choosing to buy the capability rather than build it (not that they were ever going to be good at building it). Equifax could have tried to grow its own Mexican bureau from scratch and spent a decade catching up on data and lender relationships. Buying Círculo skips all of that. In a business where the moat is the data you already hold, that head start is the whole point.

🤖 Axos Financial To Acquire AI-Native Startup Bank Arc Technologies, Axos Financial

🏃 The Rundown: Axos Financial, a roughly $29 billion-asset digital bank, agreed last week to acquire Arc Technologies, an AI-native platform that bundles cash management, debt financing and agentic finance software for startups. Arc’s leadership will stay on and terms were not disclosed. It is Axos’ fourth acquisition in a year.

🥡 Takeaway: AI is hot right now, and it was only a matter of time before the banks started buying up the product extensions they were never going to build themselves. Arc is a clean example. It bundles cash management, debt financing and a CFO agent it calls Archie into something startups actually like using, but it had no charter and leaned on Stripe to move the money. Axos has the charter, the deposits and the balance sheet, and a product experience no founder would call slick. Buying Arc gets it the AI-native front end it was never going to build in house.

I actually think a deal like this is clever, and more banks should play this game (with the usual caveats about banks struggling to digest startups). It solves a real customer problem, giving startups a finance stack that feels built for them rather than bolted onto a legacy bank. And, maybe more importantly, it is something Axos can monetise. An AI-native product layer sitting on top of a chartered bank is a new revenue line, not just a nicer login screen, and a fresh way to charge customers is exactly the kind of thing a bank likes to find.

Zoom out and this is the same story as Equifax and Círculo, in a different corner. A regulated incumbent with a charter and a balance sheet is bolting on a younger, sharper fintech front end rather than trying to build modern software itself. Axos has now done this four times in a year. Banks with charters and cash are quietly turning into acquirers of the fintech capability they spent the last decade competing with, and that might be the real through-line of 2026 more than any single AI headline.

💰 Norm AI Raises $120M At A $1.2B Valuation, TechCrunch

🏃 The Rundown: Norm AI, which builds AI agents that turn regulations into machine-readable rules for regulated enterprises, announced a $120 million Series C last week. The round values the company at $1.2 billion and was led by Khosla Ventures, with Blackstone, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, Vanguard, New York Life and TIAA participating.

🥡 Takeaway: Compliance is one of the most obvious places for agents to do real work, because so much of it is reading rules, checking them against what a company is actually doing, and writing up the result. Norm is going after that head-on, and it has also stood up an affiliated AI-native law firm so it can sell the outcome rather than just the software.

The model is the interesting part. Charging for the finished, signed-off compliance work rather than another seat is a bet that regulated firms do not want one more dashboard to staff. They want the review done to a standard a regulator will accept. If agents can genuinely take on first-pass regulatory review at that bar, that is a large, boring, deeply defensible market, and boring plus defensible is a good thing to be selling right now.

💰 Super.com Raises $65M At A $1.2B Valuation, Fortune

🏃 The Rundown: Super.com, a consumer app that helps users save, earn rewards and build credit, announced a $65 million Series D last week. The round values the Toronto-based company at $1.2 billion, up from around $700 million in 2023, and was led by TPG.

🥡 Takeaway: The number that stands out is not the valuation, it is that Super.com is profitable. In a stretch where consumer fintech has been about as out of favour as it gets, a company that started life as a hotel-booking chatbot back in 2016 has crossed $200 million in net revenue, grown more than 50% and turned a profit. That combination is rare enough right now to be worth pausing on.

The pitch is essentially Amazon Prime for saving money, a paid membership that bundles cashback, rewards and credit-building for people living closer to the edge than the affluent users most fintechs chase. It is a useful reminder that there is a real, underserved market below the premium-card crowd, and that you can build something durable serving it if the unit economics actually hold.

🎧 Rain: Building The Infrastructure For Stablecoins And Tokenised Money, Fintech Leaders (July 7)

Miguel Armaza sits down with Rain co-founder and CEO Farooq Malik on building the infrastructure behind stablecoin-powered cards, payments and wallets, the plumbing that companies like Western Union and Nuvei now run on. Well worth a listen.

🎧 Payments At Square, Etsy, And The Agentic Era, Fintech Layer Cake (July 8)

Reggie Young talks to Glenbrook partner Drew Edmond, who ran payments at Square and Etsy, about how payments actually work from the operator’s seat and where agentic commerce is heading. Refreshingly practical if you spend more time near the strategy decks than the payment flows. Add this one to your playlist.

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🙏 What did you think of this week’s issue of FR?

I Love It! ◌ I Like It ◌ Not Bad ◌ I Don’t Like It ◌ It’s Awful

If you’re new, here is a breakdown of what you can expect from each issue.

If you missed our recent editions, you can catch up here. Some previous issues you might want to check out if you’re new include “A Deep Dive Into The Cash App’s Growth Machine”, “The Future Of Payment Initiation”, and “Current: Doing It Differently”.

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Fintech Radar is a must-read for fintech founders, operators, and investors. If that’s your target audience, placing an ad right HERE is a cost-effective way to reach them.

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🪙 A 140-Company Consortium Launches Open USD To Take On Tether And Circle, Reuters

🏃 The Rundown: A consortium of more than 140 businesses, including Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, BNY, Google, Shopify, and Western Union, launched a group called Open Standard last week to issue a dollar-pegged stablecoin, Open USD (OUSD), going live later this year. It’s led on an interim basis by Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams. Members can mint and redeem OUSD with no fees and no volume caps, and reserve earnings are shared among the partners after a management fee. Stripe said OUSD will become the default stablecoin across its platform.

🥡 Takeaway: The real driver here is that the companies actually using stablecoins, or planning to, have grown wary of, and in some cases plainly tired of, depending on Circle and Tether to do it. The two issuers have run a near-duopoly on dollar stablecoins, and they keep the prize for themselves: the yield on the reserves backing the coins, billions in T-bill interest, sits with the issuer, not the businesses generating the volume. For a Stripe or a Shopify moving serious money, that’s a lot of economics flowing to a middleman they don’t control. OUSD is those companies deciding to cut the middleman out and own the rail themselves, free to mint and redeem, no volume caps, and the reserve income shared back with the members instead of pooling at the top.

A quick reminder: Stripe bought Bridge for over a billion dollars in 2024, now has its co-founder in the interim driving seat, and made OUSD its default, which hands the coin a distribution base most stablecoin launches never get near. It also tells you where the card networks have landed. Having spent this year moving up the stack into settlement and tokenised deposits as core card growth flattens, Visa and Mastercard would rather help govern a shared standard than watch someone else own the layer running underneath them. To be fair, being part of a consortium is probably more in their wheelhouse.

Also, it’s a consortium, and consortiums tend to be unstable equilibria. A hundred and forty companies will cooperate happily while Circle and Tether are the “common enemy”, but the incentives that align them now are the same ones that pull them apart once the thing has scale: whose governance, whose economics, and whose commercial priorities win. The obvious precedent is Libra, the last time this many heavyweights lined up behind a stablecoin, and Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and PayPal all walked within a year once the politics turned. Several of them are back at the table here. The consortium game is hard, and they rarely stay consortiums for long. Lest we forget, Visa and Mastercard themselves started as bank-owned cooperatives before spinning out into independent companies, and these arrangements tend to resolve one way or another, either by fragmenting or by one party taking control. Whether OUSD becomes a genuine third pole or a transitional step on the way to something more concentrated will likely come down to how long it can hold its shape.

💳 Activist Investor Forager Raises Its Hostile Bid For Repay To $1.4B, Payments Dive

🏃 The Rundown: Forager Capital Management, the largest shareholder in US payments processor Repay Holdings (Nasdaq: RPAY), made an unsolicited all-cash offer last week to take the company private at $5.25 a share, valuing it at around $1.4B. Repay said it would review the proposal with its advisers.

🥡 Takeaway: The more interesting question is why Repay is worth buying in the first place. It doesn’t chase the whole payments market. It sits inside specific verticals, embedding card and ACH payments into the software that lenders, credit unions, healthcare providers, and B2B businesses already run on. The money it moves is the unglamorous, non-discretionary kind: loan repayments, supplier invoices, and healthcare bills. That’s exactly the sort of embedded, recurring flow that’s hard to rip out once it’s wired into a vertical’s systems, and it’s the reason an acquirer would want it.

Two things turn that into acquisition appeal. First, these verticals are still mid-migration from cheque and ACH to cards and instant rails, so the volume Repay earns on keeps growing structurally even as headline card growth in retail flattens. Loan repayments and B2B accounts payable are among the last big money flows to digitise, and owning the rails into them is a long runway. Second, Repay has the vertical relationships and the embedded distribution but not the scale to compete on cost with a Fiserv or a Global Payments, and scale is most of the game in processing. A valuable position that’s too small to fully exploit is precisely what makes a company a bolt-on, worth far more inside a bigger processor’s network, or rolled up by private capital, than as a standalone the public market has quietly stopped paying attention to.

🏦 Plaid Is Weighing A US IPO, Bloomberg

🏃 The Rundown: Plaid, the account-connectivity network that plugs thousands of fintech apps into users’ bank accounts, has held early talks with banks about a US IPO, Bloomberg reported last week. No timeline, size, or price range has been set, and the discussions were described as preliminary.

🥡 Takeaway: Plaid is the plumbing a huge slice of consumer fintech quietly runs on, the connection between your budgeting app, your neobank, or your brokerage and the account where your money actually sits. An IPO has been speculated about for years, and “held preliminary discussions” is a long way from a filed S-1, so I wouldn’t read a date into it. But the conversation happening at all is worth noting.

Plaid raised at $13.4B in 2021, walked away from a $5.3B Visa acquisition after the DOJ sued to block it, and has spent the years since pushing beyond raw account linking into identity, fraud, and payments. What makes a listing interesting now is what that data layer enables: the shift I’ve written about where you no longer build a personal finance product from scratch, you pipe account data into a model and get a personalised view on the fly. Put simply, it’s AI, and Plaid sits underneath that whole movement on the financial data side in the US. A public Plaid would be the clearest signal the market has ever had on what open banking is actually worth, if it lists at all rather than letting the rumour do its work for another year.

🚀 Nubank Bids For A Small Brazilian Bank To Finally Land Its Own Licence, Rio Times

🏃 The Rundown: Nubank, Latin America’s largest digital bank, filed a binding offer last week to buy Banco Caixa Geral Brasil, the small Brazilian subsidiary of Portugal’s state-owned Caixa Geral de Depósitos, in a deal worth roughly €42M including assumed debt. Nubank is one of four finalists for the asset. The prize is the target’s full Brazilian banking licence, which Nubank still operates without.

🥡 Takeaway: Nubank has well over 100 million customers and still doesn’t hold a full Brazilian banking licence, running instead on a narrower financial-institution permit and a set of partnerships. Buying a small, sleepy bank for its charter is the fastest way to close that gap. This is licence-by-acquisition, the move that keeps showing up in emerging markets: the hard part of fintech was never the app, it’s direct access to the regulated pipes, and the cleanest route to a licence is often buying an institution that already holds one rather than waiting years for a regulator to grant you a fresh one.

A full licence would let Nubank do things its current structure makes awkward, hold client money directly, broaden its lending, and lean less on partner banks that take a margin along the way. The €42M price is a rounding error at Nubank’s size and approvals could drag into next year, but the logic makes sense. When the licence is the bottleneck, you buy the licence.

📈 Webull Buys Thailand’s Pi Securities To Push Into Southeast Asia, PR Newswire

🏃 The Rundown: Webull (Nasdaq: BULL), the US-listed retail trading platform, agreed last week to buy Pi Securities, a 50-year-old Thai brokerage, from Country Group Holdings in a deal valuing Pi at around US$100M. The acquisition is subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals.

🥡 Takeaway: Two emerging-market acquisitions in one week, both about buying a licensed local foothold rather than building one. Where Nubank wants a Brazilian charter, Webull wants a way into Southeast Asian retail trading, and a half-century-old Thai brokerage comes with the local licence, the market access, and a client base you simply can’t replicate by launching an app and waiting.

For the uninitiated, Thailand has a young, mobile-first, increasingly investing population, and Webull’s play is to bring its low-cost trading tech into markets where the local incumbents haven’t modernised. Sound familiar?

The catch with this kind of expansion is that retail brokerage is intensely local. Regulation, listed products, language, and payment rails all differ market to market, and buying your way in doesn’t automatically make you good at operating there. Webull has been aggressive about geographic expansion since going public (in comparison to, say, Robinhood, which has taken a more measured approach), and Thailand extends a pattern of planting flags across Asia-Pacific through acquisition. Now let’s see if this compounds into a durable regional platform.

💰 Addi Raises $85M Series D For Consumer Credit In Colombia, BusinessWire

🏃 The Rundown: Addi, a Colombian consumer-credit and shopping app, announced an $85M all-equity Series D last week, led by Citius and BTG Pactual, with GIC and Monashees participating. The valuation was not disclosed.

🥡 Takeaway: Addi started as a buy-now-pay-later provider for Colombian online shoppers and has widened into a broader consumer financial app, credit, payments, and a shopping surface that keeps it in front of customers between purchases. The opportunity for modern financial services in the region is now clear enough that even the incumbents want in. One of the backers here is BTG Pactual, a traditional investment bank, not the sort of name that usually funds a consumer challenger. When the establishment starts writing these cheques, you know fintech has gone mainstream in a market. Whether that’s ultimately good for the challengers or the start of the incumbents moving to co-opt it is the part that remains to be seen. If you’re a long-time reader of FR, you know what I think of “strategic investors”.

Colombia has a large, under-banked, increasingly online population and far less fintech saturation than Brazil, where Nubank and its rivals have already fought most of the land war. Addi is betting the same consumer-credit playbook has a market’s worth of room left to run, and $85M of fresh funding might just be the jet fuel it needs to go to the next level.

💰 Nebex Raises $30M To Build Financial Infrastructure For The Space Economy, BusinessWire

🏃 The Rundown: Nebex, a New York startup building market infrastructure for the space economy, announced a $30M seed round last week led by GV, with a string of venture funds participating. Alongside the raise it disclosed a new banking relationship with J.P. Morgan. The valuation was not disclosed.

🥡 Takeaway: The pitch is interesting. Nebex wants to be the plumbing for the space economy, an exchange layer (Nebra Exchange) that connects space companies to the sovereign buyers and capital, and automates the cross-border payments and contracts between manufacturers and foreign governments. Put simply, it’s trying to make money move through the space industry the way it moves through every other market. Translation: it’s a verticalised payments business for the space industry, built by people who have vertical domain expertise.

The payments here are large, much like plenty of other B2B segments, big, lumpy, low-frequency flows rather than the high-volume streams most payments infrastructure is built for. The bet is simple: if the space economy really takes off (pardon the pun), the company that owns the rails for settling and financing those deals becomes the Stripe of the segment. It’s a genuinely fascinating vertical payments business, and $30M from GV buys a decent run at finding out whether the market grows into it.

🎧 Cross River’s Chief AI Officer On Agentic Commerce, Fintech Business Podcast (July 3)

Jason Mikula interviews Cross River’s Chief Data and AI Officer, Pravesh Rijal, on the bank’s expanded card-issuing partnership with Stripe for agentic commerce, and how you actually manage the risk of letting AI agents transact. A useful look at the plumbing and the controls behind letting software spend money on a customer’s behalf. Well worth a listen.

🎧 Why Full Autonomy Beats Co-Pilots For AI In Banking, Fintech One-on-One (July 2)

Peter Renton talks to Gradient Labs CEO Dimitri Masin, who ran data science and AI at Monzo before starting the company, on why he thinks fully autonomous agents beat human-in-the-loop co-pilots for customer operations in regulated financial services. Masin makes a sharper case than most for taking the human out of the loop entirely. Add this one to your playlist.

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📧 Feel free to reach out if you want to connect. I’m @alantsen on Twitter, or you can D.M. me directly by clicking the button below ↴

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🙏 What did you think of this week’s issue of FR?

I Love It! ◌ I Like It ◌ Not Bad ◌ I Don’t Like It ◌ It’s Awful

If you’re new, here is a breakdown of what you can expect from each issue.

If you missed our recent editions, you can catch up here. Some previous issues you might want to check out if you’re new include “A Deep Dive Into The Cash App's Growth Machine”, “The Future Of Payment Initiation”, and “Current: Doing It Differently”.

Your ad could be HERE!

Fintech Radar is a must-read for fintech founders, operators, and investors. If that’s your target audience, placing an ad right HERE is a cost-effective way to reach them.

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🚀 Meta Puts $900M Into CRED And Takes Its Founder To Run WhatsApp, TechCrunch

🏃 The Rundown: Meta led a $900M Series H in Indian fintech CRED last week, a mix of roughly $500M primary and $400M secondary, at a $4.5B post-money valuation. The deal gives Meta a minority stake of around 20%, with CRED noting Meta won’t get access to its customer data. At the same time, CRED founder Kunal Shah is leaving the operating role to become global head of WhatsApp, succeeding Will Cathcart. Miten Sampat steps in as interim CEO.

🥡 Takeaway: The genuinely interesting part is that CRED raised $900M at all, and at this particular juncture. The round values it at $4.5B, still well below the $6.4B peak it hit in 2022, so this is a company being funded at a markdown on where it stood four years ago. Late-stage capital has been hard to come by and down-rounds are usually where investors turn cautious, yet CRED pulled in one of the larger single fintech cheques of the year. That says someone wanted in badly enough to look straight past the repricing.

That someone is Meta, and the structure is what makes it interesting. The same announcement put CRED’s founder Kunal Shah in charge of WhatsApp, the most important piece of consumer infrastructure in India, with hundreds of millions of users. Meta has spent years trying to turn it into a payments and commerce surface through WhatsApp Pay, with limited success against UPI apps like PhonePe and Google Pay. Putting an operator who built a business on top of UPI in charge of WhatsApp tells you where Meta thinks the next leg of growth is. It isn’t messaging. It’s commerce and money movement, in the one market where WhatsApp has the distribution and has so far failed to convert it.

The investment and the hire are really the same bet pointed in two directions. Meta gets a stake in a company that understands Indian credit and consumer behaviour, plus the person who built it, and Shah gets the WhatsApp distribution that any Indian fintech founder would quietly kill for. CRED gets capital and a strategic backer at a moment when neither was easy to find.

What I’d watch from here is whether Shah’s move signals that Meta is finally serious about payments in India rather than dabbling. The graveyard of platforms that tried to bolt finance onto a social product is well populated, and distribution has never been Meta’s problem. Turning attention into a primary financial relationship is the hard part, and it’s the part Shah will now own.

🏦 N26 Posts Its First Full Year Of Profit Under A New CEO, N26

🏃 The Rundown: N26, the Berlin-based neobank, reported its first full year of net profitability last week, posting €1.6M of net income for 2025 against a €42M loss the year before. Revenue rose 13% to €501.6M and gross profit grew 33% to €350.5M, with 5.6 million revenue-relevant customers and deposits above €10.5B. The results are the first under new CEO Mike Dargan, the former UBS executive who took over in December after co-founders Valentin Stalf and Maximilian Tayenthal stepped away.

🥡 Takeaway: A €1.6M profit on more than half a billion in revenue is a thin margin, and that isn’t really the point. The point is the sign flipping from minus to plus at all. N26 spent years as the poster child for European neobanking’s growth-at-all-costs phase, complete with a BaFin growth cap, regulatory headaches, and a very public falling-out between its founders and its investors. Coming out the other side with a full year in the black says the model can pay for itself, which was never a given.

More telling than the headline number is the mix. Net fee and commission income, the subscriptions and card revenue, grew 21% and now makes up 53% of gross profit. That’s the half of the business that doesn’t depend on interest rates staying high, and it’s the half that matters most as rates come down and the deposit-margin tailwind that has flattered every neobank’s numbers starts to fade. A challenger leaning on fees rather than net interest income is in a sturdier spot than one riding the rate cycle, or so I’m sure they hope.

The leadership backdrop is the other half of the story. This profit arrives under Mike Dargan, an ex-UBS operator, with the founders who built N26 now gone after a stretch of investor unrest. It’s the familiar arc of a disruptor growing into an institution, the early swagger traded for a CFO’s discipline and a cleaner cost line. Direct costs came down 17%, and Q1 this year already shows €9.8M of net income, so the momentum looks real rather than a one-off.

The open question is growth. N26 spent years constrained, first by the regulator and then by its own caution, and a steady, profitable, professionally run bank is a different animal from the land-grab challenger it used to be. Turning the corner on profitability is the easier part. Doing it while reaccelerating customer growth in markets where Revolut keeps pulling ahead is the harder one, and that’s what I’d watch from here.

💳 Erste And Raiffeisen Join Wero As Europe’s Bank-Owned Payment Network Adds Austria, EPI

🏃 The Rundown: Last week the European Payments Initiative, the bank-owned group behind the account-to-account network Wero, added Erste Bank Oesterreich and Raiffeisen as shareholders to support Wero’s rollout in Austria. Wero, which lets people pay directly bank-to-bank using a phone number or email instead of a card, now serves more than 55 million users across Belgium, France, and Germany, with expansion underway in Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Austria.

🥡 Takeaway: The story isn’t two more banks signing up, it’s that Europe’s banks are building a payments network they own outright. Wero is account-to-account: money moves straight from one bank account to another over instant SEPA rails, cutting the card networks out of the transaction. That’s a competitive play as much as a sovereignty one. Take Visa and Mastercard out of the flow and you take out the fees that come with them, which means cheaper acceptance for merchants and more of the payment economics staying with the banks, while loosening Europe’s reliance on two American networks at the same time. Erste and Raiffeisen bring Austria into the fold, following Commerzbank’s about-face and N26 signing on, and the banks would plainly rather own the rail than keep renting someone else’s.

It’s the mirror image of a theme that keeps showing up in FR: Visa and Mastercard are moving up the stack into fraud, identity, and agentic payments as core card volume flattens, while Wero comes at the base, the everyday payment and the margin attached to it. The catch is that account-to-account networks win person-to-person transfers easily and struggle with what cards are actually good at, credit, rewards, dispute protection, and being accepted everywhere without a second thought. P2P is the wedge. Checkout and in-store, which Wero is rolling out through 2026, are the real test.

🤖 Backbase Buys Kasisto To Make Its Banking OS Agentic, Backbase

🏃 The Rundown: Backbase, the Dutch banking software provider, acquired Kasisto last week for an undisclosed sum. Kasisto, a New York company, built one of the early conversational AI platforms for banks and has since moved into agentic AI. Its platform, team, and financial-services models fold into Backbase’s AI-native Banking OS, with the combined agentic suite available to customers immediately.

🥡 Takeaway: Backbase sells the digital banking layer that hundreds of banks and credit unions run their apps and onboarding on. Kasisto spent years building AI specifically for financial services, starting with chatbots that mostly disappointed and moving towards agents that can actually do things rather than just answer questions. Buying it is Backbase deciding that the next version of a banking platform isn’t screens a customer taps through, it’s agents that act on the customer’s behalf, and that it would rather own that capability than partner for it.

The driver underneath it is that a generic assistant was never going to fly inside a bank. The interesting work in financial services AI isn’t the model, it’s everything around it: the guardrails, the audit trail, the domain knowledge, the integration into core systems that regulators expect to be able to inspect. Kasisto’s value is the years spent on that unglamorous layer, the same reason banks won’t just point a consumer chatbot at their workflows. An agent built for the controls a bank already lives with is a far easier sell than a brilliant general-purpose one that can’t show its working.

For mid-sized banks and credit unions, the appeal is getting agentic banking as part of the platform they already buy, instead of standing up an AI team they can’t staff. That’s the same logic that drove the Adyen and Airwallex deals earlier this month: agentic capability is becoming something you acquire and embed, not something every institution builds from scratch. The build-versus-buy line in fintech keeps sliding towards buy, and AI is accelerating it.

🔮 Meta Is Quietly Building A Prediction Markets App Called Arena, The New York Times

🏃 The Rundown: Mark Zuckerberg has directed a small team to build a standalone prediction-markets app, internally codenamed Arena, the New York Times reported last week. It would let users forecast outcomes across politics, sports, and entertainment, much like Polymarket and Kalshi, but start with a video-game-style points system rather than real money, with cash wagering not ruled out later. The app would run separately from Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Shares in listed betting platforms fell on the report. Meta declined to comment, and insiders caution it may never launch.

🥡 Takeaway: The real signal here is how hot prediction markets have become, gone from a niche to one of the hottest corners of finance in about a year. Monthly volume across the category has run from a little over $1B in early 2025 to north of $20B, Kalshi just raised at a $22B valuation, and the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange has taken a stake in Polymarket. A category that barely existed at scale before the 2024 election is now being treated as a real asset class.

And everyone with distribution wants a piece. Robinhood calls event contracts its fastest-growing product line ever, Coinbase has plugged them in, DraftKings and FanDuel are bolting them onto their sportsbooks, and X made Polymarket its official partner. The mechanics are commoditised, so the scarce input is an audience, which is exactly what these platforms already own. Meta building its own app, with more distribution than any of them, is just the most extreme version of the same move.

Meta’s starting with points rather than real money, with cash betting not ruled out later, which is a smart wedge: build the habit free-to-play first and switch on the stakes once it sticks. Whether Arena ships at all is another question, since Meta’s 2020 attempt, Forecast, quietly disappeared. But it’s a space I’ve been tracking all year, and a points-only prototype with a few billion users on tap is a more serious entrant than it might first look.

💰 Airwallex Raises $320M Series H At An $11B Valuation, Airwallex

🏃 The Rundown: Airwallex, the global business payments and finance platform, announced a $320M Series H last week at an $11B valuation, up from $8B in December. The round was led by Addition, with participation from Baillie Gifford, Hummingbird, QED Investors, T. Rowe Price, and Amex Ventures.

🥡 Takeaway: This is Airwallex’s third round in about thirteen months, taking it from a $6.2B Series F to $8B to $11B, and it lands the same month it bought the revenue-recognition platform Leapfin. A company that spent years as a cross-border payments play keeps raising to fund its move into a full business-finance platform, accounts, cards, treasury, spend, and now the accounting layer, which is the same ground Stripe, Wise, Brex, and Mercury are all fighting over.

The framing this time is AI, with Airwallex pitching itself as finance software run by agents rather than just rails that move money. That tracks with everywhere else in this issue, but the part that’s harder to copy isn’t the AI, it’s the licence stack and direct access to local rails Airwallex has spent years assembling across Asia, the US, and Europe (which is generally under discussed). The capital is there to keep buying its way into that footprint faster than rivals can build it, and the US remains the market where the thesis gets properly tested.

💰 Quantifind Raises $200M For AI-Driven Financial-Crime Intelligence, Financial IT

🏃 The Rundown: Quantifind, which builds AI tools for financial-crime risk, sanctions screening, and KYC/AML investigations used by banks and government agencies, announced a $200M raise last week.

🥡 Takeaway: Financial-crime compliance is one of the largest and least-loved cost centres in any bank, an army of analysts working through alerts, most of which are false positives, under the constant threat of a regulatory fine if something real slips through. It’s close to a perfect use case for AI: high volume, pattern-heavy, repetitive, and expensive. The harder part is that cutting the noise without missing the signal is a matter of taste, the built-up knowledge of what a genuine risk actually looks like versus what only resembles one, and that judgment is the bit that’s difficult to encode. A $200M round at this stage says investors think Quantifind has enough of it to take real cost out rather than just assist at the margins.

That’s why the crowded field matters less than it might. “AI for AML” is getting busy, with incumbents and a wave of startups all making a version of the same claim, but my guess is the winners will be the few who can actually prove that taste to the people paid to be sceptical of it, the bank risk officers, examiners, and government agencies Quantifind already counts as customers. That bar, not a slick demo, is the whole game.

🎧 The End Of The Checklist Era, Fintech Takes (June 24)

Alex Johnson sits down with Persona’s Andrew DiMattina on how a lighter-touch regulatory environment is quietly pushing compliance risk off the regulators and onto financial institutions themselves, and why tick-the-box compliance is giving way to genuinely substantive risk management. A timely listen given how much of this week’s news was about AI moving into exactly those workflows. Well worth a listen.

🎧 How Figure And Method Closed The Loop On Debt Consolidation, Tearsheet (June 24)

Zack Miller talks to Method’s Mit Shah and Figure’s Rod Albuyeh about using real-time liability data to automate debt payoff at the point a HELOC is originated, and the numbers they’re claiming as a result: delinquency cut in half, funded conversion doubled, a meaningful FICO lift. A good, concrete example of what plumbing two data sources together can actually do for a lending product. Add this one to your playlist.

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💳 American Express To Buy TheFork From Tripadvisor For $700M, American Express

🏃 The Rundown: American Express agreed last week to buy TheFork, Tripadvisor’s European restaurant-reservation platform, for $700M in cash. TheFork brings more than 50,000 restaurants across 11 European countries and joins Resy and Tock in Amex’s dining stable.

🥡 Takeaway: Amex isn’t really buying a reservations app. It’s buying the table. With Resy, Tock, and the in-venue payments outfit Rooam all folded in over the past few years, now run as a unit literally called Amex Global Dining, TheFork pushes the bookable network to roughly 75,000 venues and plants a flag across Europe. The logic is the same one Amex has run for years: the card is the least interesting part of the relationship. What keeps a premium cardholder paying the annual fee is access, the hard-to-get table on a Friday night, the pre-sale, the concierge that actually delivers. Owning the reservations layer means Amex controls that access directly rather than renting it.

There’s a neat contrast with where Visa and Mastercard are spending their money. The networks are moving up the stack into fraud, identity, tokenisation, and agentic checkout, the plumbing of the transaction itself. Amex, with its closed loop, is moving the other way: up into the experience around the transaction. It owns the reservation rail outright now, and rents the rest of the access economy through partnerships, the AEG and AXS ticketing tie-up, the F1 and stadium deals. Either way it sees both sides of the spend, so a reservation isn’t just a booking, it’s a signal it feeds back into rewards, merchant offers, and underwriting. Restaurants get demand, Amex gets data and stickiness, the cardholder gets the table.

The risk is integration. Resy and Tock both came with loyal restaurant bases that bristle at being folded into a card company’s marketing machine, and TheFork’s European footprint adds a layer of local complexity. What’s almost funny is that Amex, through its dining roll-up, has quietly become one of the largest restaurant-tech portfolios anywhere. And it all exists to defend the one thing that matters to Amex: a reason to keep the card at the top of the wallet.

🏦 Deluxe To Acquire Payments Processor Celero Commerce For $625M, Deluxe

🏃 The Rundown: Deluxe, the 110-year-old company best known for printing cheques, agreed last week to buy Nashville-based SMB payments processor Celero Commerce for $625M in cash. Celero did more than $200M in revenue last year at a 28% adjusted EBITDA margin, putting the deal at roughly 7.4x trailing EBITDA. Deluxe is funding it with a $375M term loan and expects to close in the third quarter.

🥡 Takeaway: There’s a certain symmetry in the company that built its business on the cheque buying its way deeper into the rails that are killing the cheque. Deluxe has been managing this transition for years, and this deal more or less completes it. Once Celero closes, payments and data will make up around 57% of Deluxe’s revenue, up from 31% in 2020. The cheque business funded the pivot away from the cheque business.

It’s also another tick in the SMB-acquiring consolidation column. The long tail of small-business payment processing has been getting rolled up for a decade now, and the logic keeps holding: distribution and merchant relationships are expensive to build and cheap to buy, and an incumbent with a balance sheet and an existing small-business base can bolt on a processor and cross-sell immediately. At 7.4x EBITDA, Deluxe isn’t paying a growth-tech multiple. It’s paying a “we need to still be relevant in five years” multiple.

What makes business banking different from the consumer side is that very little of it runs on brand love. Deluxe’s small-business customers don’t need to feel anything about the change (or not much). Put a better-priced, better-integrated product in front of them and they’ll switch, because the calculation is cost and outcome, not loyalty. That’s the quiet advantage legacy firms still have: a book of business that moves on ROI, and the cash to go buy the product that improves it. They just have to make sure the ROI is actually there, which is easier said than done.

🌐 Ripple Takes A Strategic Stake In Flutterwave At A $3.25B Valuation, TechCrunch

🏃 The Rundown: Flutterwave, Africa’s most valuable fintech, closed a Series E last week that values it at around $3.25B, with Ripple coming in as a strategic equity investor. The round size and the size of Ripple’s stake weren’t disclosed. As part of the deal, Flutterwave will plug Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin and the XRP Ledger into its cross-border payments rails.

🥡 Takeaway: Strip away the valuation headline and the interesting part is who’s on the cap table. Ripple taking equity is a distribution play. Flutterwave moves money across some of the hardest corridors in the world and, after years of grinding through regulators, holds one of the deepest licence stacks of any non-bank on the continent, including a Nigerian banking licence earned this year. Ripple has the stablecoin infrastructure and not much African distribution. You can see the shape of the trade.

It also looks like another step towards stablecoins becoming a real settlement layer for emerging-market payments rather than a pilot. The logic is mundane: moving dollars between Lagos, Nairobi, and São Paulo is slow, expensive, and full of trapped liquidity, and a stablecoin rail collapses the settlement leg. Flutterwave isn’t doing this because crypto is interesting. It’s doing it because it’s a cheaper pipe.

What I’d watch is the licence stack, not the token. Plenty of players can route a payment through a stablecoin; very few have spent the years and legal fees to earn direct access to local rails and central banks across dozens of African markets, which is no small feat. That’s the part you can’t vibe-code. As I like to say, the magic in cross-border money movement is in the off-ramp.

🏦 Germany Refuses To Back UniCredit’s ~€39B Bid For Commerzbank, The Wall Street Journal

🏃 The Rundown: The German government, which owns close to 13% of Commerzbank, formally refused last week to tender its shares into UniCredit’s roughly €39B (about $45B) takeover offer, calling the approach aggressive and the premium too low. UniCredit says it has already crossed the 30% threshold once derivatives are counted. A supplementary acceptance window now runs into early July, and Frankfurt prosecutors have opened a preliminary market-manipulation inquiry.

🥡 Takeaway: The real story is that banking is still treated as a strategic national asset in a way almost nothing else in finance is. Berlin doesn’t want a Milan-headquartered bank owning one of its two big commercial lenders, so the government is sitting on its 13% stake and saying so out loud, premium be damned. A card network can buy a reservations platform and a cheque company can buy a processor in the same week without a politician blinking. Move to consolidate a systemic bank across a national border and the state shows up.

Europe has spent fifteen years talking about a banking union and cross-border champions that can rival the American giants, but the moment a real combination gets close, national interest reasserts itself. Payments are plumbing you can let anyone own. A big domestic bank is sovereignty, and governments guard it accordingly. This is a case in point.

🚀 Revolut Secures Full UAE Payment Licences, Clearing It To Launch In The Middle East, Bloomberg

🏃 The Rundown: Revolut secured full Stored Value Facilities and Retail Payment Services licences from the Central Bank of the UAE last week, upgrading the in-principle approval it won in 2025 and clearing it to launch in the Emirates. The licences cover multi-currency accounts, cards, and local and cross-border transfers, but not deposits, lending, or trading. Revolut says it will build out local operations before going live.

🥡 Takeaway: The UAE is one of the most hotly contested fintech markets going, and it’s easy to see why Revolut wants in. Dubai and Abu Dhabi have spent years pulling in wealthy expats and fund managers, and the country sits on one of the largest outbound remittance flows on the planet, with millions of workers sending money home to India, Pakistan, and the Philippines. That is FX and cross-border volume, the part of the business Revolut runs better than almost anyone.

It’s a payments licence, not a banking one, so Revolut can’t take deposits or lend there yet. That matters less than it sounds: the wedge into a new market is almost always the multi-currency account and the cheap transfer, with deposits and credit layered on once the relationship exists. Revolut has run this playbook market by market.

The harder part is that the UAE isn’t greenfield. Local players and well-funded regional challengers already have the distribution and the regulatory relationships, and the remittance corridors are served by incumbents competing hard on price. Winning the expat who already has a Revolut account from London is the easy bit. Becoming the primary account for someone who lives and earns in Dubai is the real test, and that’s a trust and habit problem more than a licensing one. But it’s one they’ve figured out before.

💰 Festina Finance Raises €25M To Modernise Pension And Insurance Core Systems, FinTech Futures

🏃 The Rundown: Festina Finance, a Copenhagen-based provider of core administration and financial-planning software for pension funds, life insurers, and banks, announced a €25M+ growth investment led by Birchway Capital, valuing the company at around €200M.

🥡 Takeaway: Core systems for pensions and life insurance are some of the least glamorous software in financial services, and some of the stickiest. These are decades-old platforms that insurers and pension funds are terrified to touch, because a migration gone wrong means mispriced policies and a regulator on the phone. That fear is the opportunity: it keeps the incumbents slow, and it makes a clean, cloud-native replacement genuinely valuable to anyone willing to do the unglamorous work of ripping out a mainframe. And that’s obviously the hard part.

It’s also a reminder that not all of fintech is consumer apps and stablecoin rails. A lot of the durable value sits in the boring middle (stitching the financial fabric, as I like to call it), the policy administration, the actuarial engines, the core ledgers the whole industry runs on. Festina is going after a real gap in the European pension space and the kind of customer that signs a ten-year contract and doesn’t churn.

💰 Interchecks Raises $50M Series C For Instant Payments, PR Newswire

🏃 The Rundown: Interchecks, a Brooklyn-based instant-payments infrastructure company serving sportsbooks, lenders, and fintechs, announced a $50M Series C led by Bettor Capital.

🥡 Takeaway: When one of your lead investors is literally called Bettor Capital, you know where Interchecks cut its teeth. It moves money in and out for sportsbooks like DraftKings and FanDuel, and the same rails now run payouts for lenders, earned-wage-access apps, and fintechs like Credit Karma Money. The platform is two-sided: instant payouts on the way out, pay-by-bank funding on the way in.

The funding side is the underrated half, and gaming shows why. Cards are a bad fit for the category, between gambling declines, expensive interchange, and chargebacks, so pay-by-bank routes around all of it by pulling straight from the customer’s bank account. Deposits that would have failed go through, costs drop, and in a business where a declined deposit is a lost bet and often a lost customer, that’s worth real money. It’s the same trick in lending, earned-wage access, and crypto funding: deposit-and-payout plumbing tuned for verticals the card networks find too hard, which is exactly what keeps the competition out.

🎧 From Fannie Mae’s First PM To Building At Pathward, Fintech Layer Cake (June 18)

Reggie Young talks to Pathward’s Suhas Reddy about building product in the most heavily regulated corners of financial services, from his early days as a product manager at Fannie Mae through to life at a sponsor bank. A good one if you care about how product actually gets shipped when compliance is in the room. Well worth a listen.

🎧 A Deep Dive On Vertical Fintech With Increase And Tekion, Fintech One-On-One (June 18)

Peter Renton digs into vertical fintech with Matt Hennessy of Increase and Jamie Fox of Tekion, on why so much of the interesting stuff now gets built deep into a single industry rather than sold horizontally to everyone. Add this one to your playlist.

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🌐 Nuvei Is In Advanced Talks To Buy Payoneer For Around $2.7B, Reuters

🏃 The Rundown: Reuters reported last week that Nuvei, the Canadian payments firm taken private by Advent for $6.3bn two years ago, is in advanced talks to acquire New York cross-border payments company Payoneer for around $2.7bn. The figure includes Payoneer’s cash, implying an enterprise value closer to $2.3bn. Payoneer shares jumped more than 20% on the report. No deal has been signed, and either side could still walk.

🥡 Takeaway: On the face of it, Payoneer slots neatly into what Nuvei already does. Nuvei is strong on the acceptance side, taking payments for merchants, and Payoneer built its business on the other half of the flow, getting money out to freelancers, marketplace sellers, and suppliers in the places big banks find awkward to reach. The fit is obvious enough. The more interesting read is what the combination could become, a much more complete cross-border proposition, one centred on payouts but anchored by the merchant acceptance business Nuvei has built in the kind of difficult markets and unglamorous verticals most processors steer clear of.

Nuvei’s strength was never the easy, blue-chip merchant everyone competes for, it was the harder, higher-risk markets and the less glamorous customers other processors are happy to pass on. Bolt Payoneer’s payout network onto that and you don’t just get a company that can both collect and disburse, you get one that can do it end to end in exactly the markets where moving money is hardest and the competition is thinnest. Payoneer’s own base of millions of small businesses and sellers across emerging markets is a distribution asset that’s genuinely hard to rebuild, and worth far more inside a platform that already owns the acceptance side than it ever was as a standalone public company struggling for a re-rating.

This is still a report on talks, not a signed deal, and the market isn’t treating it as a certainty given Payoneer is still trading below the mooted price. But if it does come together, it would be the biggest cross-border consolidation move of the year so far, and the point where Nuvei goes from a strong acceptance business to a genuinely complete cross-border platform, one that can move money in both directions across the markets where doing so is hardest.

🧾 Adyen Buys Usage-Based Billing Startup Orb For $335M, Adyen

🏃 The Rundown: Last week Adyen agreed to acquire Orb, a San Francisco usage-based billing platform, for $335m in cash, with the deal expected to close in July. Orb meters real-time consumption and turns complex pricing contracts into invoices for software companies including Vercel, Replit, and Supabase, and will run as a standalone subsidiary. It’s Adyen’s second acquisition this year.

🥡 Takeaway: Adyen is buying again. The company spent two decades building everything in-house and acquiring nobody, then did two deals in the space of a few months. For a business that treated build-over-buy as close to religion, it’s a fascinating shift, and probably a sign they see now as the moment to accelerate, and maybe to find some value while everyone else is focused on pure-play AI.

What it’s getting with Orb is a way into billing, which is a smart place to be right now. Software used to be sold by the seat, and a seat is easy to invoice. AI and usage-based pricing broke that. Companies now charge by consumption, by tokens, by outcomes, and the billing gets genuinely hard, metering real-time usage and turning messy contracts into accurate invoices. Orb is one of the better tools for exactly that problem, which is why the AI-native software crowd like Vercel, Replit, and Supabase runs on it.

The strategic logic is what Adyen calls revenue infrastructure, which is a fancy way of saying it wants to own the whole path from working out what to charge a customer to actually collecting the money. Most billing systems sit upstream of payments and can’t see what happens at settlement. Bolt Orb’s consumption data onto Adyen’s payments, fraud, and account-level view, and you can connect how a company prices to how the money actually moves. For a payments business hunting for the next layer to expand into, the workflow sitting just above the transaction is a logical place to go.

Step back, and this is a bet on where payments are heading. Once pricing is metered like that, billing and payments stop being two separate steps and collapse into one continuous, real-time flow, and whoever owns both the meter and the money movement is in a strong position. It’s the wallets-to-workflows pattern again, payments players reaching past moving money into the software on either side of it. The difference here is that the workflow Adyen is buying is the one that decides what the payment even is.

📈 Coinbase Opens Its Exchange To AI Agents With ‘Coinbase For Agents’, TechCrunch

🏃 The Rundown: Last week Coinbase launched Coinbase for Agents, which plugs an AI assistant like ChatGPT or Claude directly into a user’s Coinbase account so it can place trades, manage a portfolio, and soon pay for services on its own, within limits the user sets. It ships as an MCP integration for consumer assistants and a CLI for developers, starting with crypto spot and derivatives trading, with equities and prediction markets to follow. The launch came days after Robinhood opened its own platform to trading agents.

🥡 Takeaway: The pitch is that you stop tapping around an app and just tell an agent what you want done with your money. Rebalance to a target mix, dollar-cost average into something, sit on a limit order, and the agent does the clicking. Coinbase is shipping this days after Robinhood opened its own platform to trading agents, so the race to be the place an AI agent actually executes trades is on, and the two are coming at it from opposite ends, Robinhood from equities, Coinbase from crypto.

What makes Coinbase’s version more interesting than a chatbot bolted onto a brokerage is the payments piece. Alongside trading, agents can use x402, Coinbase’s machine-to-machine USDC protocol, to pay for things like data feeds, research, or compute without a human logging in anywhere. That closes a real loop, an agent can buy the research, act on it, and settle the trade in one motion, all on Coinbase’s rails. Pairing exchange execution with its own payments protocol is something a pure brokerage can’t match, and it’s where Coinbase thinks its edge is.

What’s not yet clear is how many people will actually hand an agent the keys to their trading account. The guardrails are sensible, you can run the agent in an isolated sub-account, cap what it spends, and limit which actions it can take, and Coinbase paired the launch with a registered in-app advisor to keep the guidance on the right side of the regulators. But letting software trade your money on its own is a real trust step, and the failure modes, a bad fill, a misread thesis, an agent that does exactly what you said rather than what you meant, are the kind that get remembered. The infrastructure for agentic finance is arriving fast. Whether retail comfort keeps up is a whole other story.

📱 Cash App Launches A $40 Phone Plan Built Into The App, Cash App

🏃 The Rundown: Last week Cash App launched Cash App Mobile, an eSIM phone plan running on AT&T’s network through connectivity startup Gigs, priced at $40 a month for unlimited 5G, talk, and text. There are no contracts and no credit checks, and the plan is managed inside the Cash App alongside spending and saving. It’s rolling out to select users first, with wider availability later this year.

🥡 Takeaway: The way to read this isn’t as Cash App getting into telco, it’s as a phone plan becoming table stakes for any app trying to be a super app. Cash App’s version is a near-copy of the one Klarna launched last year, down to the same Gigs plumbing, the same AT&T network, and the same $40 price, and Monzo added its own eSIM plan a couple of issues back. When three consumer fintechs ship the near-identical product inside a year, it has stopped being a clever experiment and become part of the standard playbook.

And the driver underneath the move feels like it’s revenue. A phone plan is about as sticky a line as you can add. People pay it every month without really thinking about it, and almost nobody bothers to switch carriers, so once a customer is on it the churn is low and the income is predictable. Block isn’t trying to out-muscle the carriers on margin. It’s layering a durable, recurring revenue stream onto a user base it already has, which is a much cheaper way to grow revenue per user than going out and acquiring new customers.

Beyond the revenue, it feeds the bigger strategy of making Cash App the one app its users run their financial lives through. Every essential service Block can fold into the wallet, spending, saving, and now connectivity, makes the whole thing a little harder to leave and nudges Cash App closer to the all-in-one model that has worked so well in Asia. There’s a full-circle quality to it, too. In Japan it was the telcos that moved into financial services, with Docomo and KDDI’s au building payments and banking on top of their mobile bases. Now it’s a financial services app reaching the other way, into telco. Different starting point, same end state, one company sitting on both your money and your phone.

🤖 Visa Wires Itself Into The Agent Economy With An OpenAI Deal And Tokenized Deposits, Visa

🏃 The Rundown: At its Payments Forum last week, Visa announced a partnership with OpenAI to let agents make Visa payments inside OpenAI’s commerce experiences, an “Agent Score” that helps merchants judge whether an AI agent can be trusted to transact, and “Tokenized Deposits,” a layer that lets banks turn ordinary deposits into programmable digital money. The same week, Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines, a service for high-frequency, low-value transactions between machines.

🥡 Takeaway: Regular readers will have noticed the card schemes keep showing up in FR recently, and there’s a reason for it. Core card volume growth is flattening in mature markets, so Visa and Mastercard are both pushing up the stack into new revenue lines, fraud and identity, value-added services, and now the infrastructure for agents and machines to pay each other. The agent economy is the next big surface to land on, and neither of them intends to be the dumb pipe underneath it.

The OpenAI partnership is intentionally the headline they’re going for, because it puts Visa directly inside the place a lot of agentic commerce is going to happen. The more strategically interesting piece, though, is Tokenised Deposits. For the last year the stablecoin crowd has been making the case that programmable money routes around the banks and the networks. Visa’s answer is to give banks a way to tokenise their own deposits and keep them on rails Visa helps run. It’s the incumbents’ counter to stablecoins, and a bid to own the tokenised-money layer rather than let it route around them.

Mastercard’s machine-to-machine launch is the same instinct pointed at a slightly different future, one where it isn’t a human approving a purchase but a fleet of agents and devices transacting thousands of times in tiny amounts. Building a network for that now, before the volume really exists, is a bet on where this is heading.

I’d keep the scepticism dial somewhere in the middle. A lot of this is still announcements and pilots (I know, I’m sounding like a broken record on this point), and the agent economy is getting plumbed faster than it’s getting used. But the direction of travel is unmistakable. The networks have decided the agent economy will run on rails, and they would very much like those rails to be theirs. Whether the tokenised-deposit model or the stablecoin model wins the programmable-money layer is the fight I’ll be watching for the rest of the year (and likely beyond).

🚀 KOHO Raises C$130M And Becomes A Unicorn On Its Way To A Bank Charter, BetaKit

🏃 The Rundown: KOHO, the Canadian challenger bank, announced a C$130m (around US$97m) Series E that values it at C$1.33bn, making it Canada’s newest fintech unicorn. New backers include Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, and Affirm COO Michael Linford, alongside existing investors. The raise is earmarked for the capital base KOHO needs to secure a Schedule 1 banking licence.

🥡 Takeaway: The interesting thing here is what the money is actually for. KOHO isn’t raising to fund growth in the usual sense, it’s raising to build the capital base a federal banking licence requires. Canadian banking is one of the most concentrated, hardest-to-crack markets in the developed world, dominated by a handful of incumbents, and a challenger landing a Schedule 1 charter would be a genuine event. The cap table tells you people who know fintech think it has a real shot, with a sovereign wealth fund and two of the more respected operators in the business writing cheques.

It also fits a pattern we’ve been tracking all year, specifically neobanks deciding that renting access through sponsor banks isn’t enough and going for their own charters. The licence is expensive, slow, and capital-intensive, which is exactly why it’s worth having, and that matters more in the age of AI, not less. When building software gets this cheap and fast, the durable advantage moves to the genuinely hard things, and in fintech the hard thing has never been the app, it’s the licence and the regulated access underneath it. Get the charter, and you control your funding, your economics, and your product surface in a way the sponsor-bank model never quite allows.

🚀 Blnk Raises $37M To Scale Point-Of-Sale Lending In Egypt, TechCabal

🏃 The Rundown: Blnk, an Egyptian point-of-sale lender, announced $37m in new funding, split between a $12.5m Series A equity round led by Algebra Ventures and $24.6m in local-currency debt facilities. The company underwrites instant credit at checkout across thousands of merchants and is rolling out a credit-card product.

🥡 Takeaway: Blnk is buy now, pay later for a market the model was arguably built for. Card penetration in Egypt sits around 4%, and plenty of people have no formal credit history at all, which is exactly where instant, embedded, point-of-sale credit does the most work. Rather than wait for someone to build up a credit file, Blnk underwrites them at the moment of purchase, about the only practical way to lend to customers the traditional banks have mostly skipped. That it’s already profitable and growing fast makes it more than just an emerging-markets growth story.

The broader read is that buy now, pay later has gone properly global. It started as a developed-market story, Afterpay out of Australia, Klarna in Europe, Affirm in the US, splitting a pair of trainers into instalments for shoppers who already had cards and credit scores. The more interesting version is the one playing out across Egypt, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, where BNPL isn’t a convenience bolted onto an existing credit system, it’s the first credit a lot of people ever get access to. Same product, very different job, and arguably a far more useful one.

🎧 Inside Current’s $80M Series E, Fintech Business Podcast (June 11, 2026)

Jason Mikula sits down with Current CEO Stuart Sopp and CTO Trevor Marshall right after their $80m Series E to dig into how the consumer neobank got to a third straight year of 70% growth, what they mean by “return on tokens,” and how they’re thinking about the path to an IPO. A good look inside a consumer fintech that’s quietly kept growing in a tough stretch for the category. Well worth a listen.

🎧 Facing Credit: Pessimism And Performance, Fintech Takes (June 10, 2026)

Alex Johnson talks to Dave Wasik of 2nd Order Solutions about why consumer sentiment keeps diverging from how credit is actually performing, and what’s quietly shifting underneath in lending and enforcement. If you make decisions off credit data, it’s a clear-eyed reality check on what the numbers are and aren’t telling you. Add this one to your playlist.

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🧾 Airwallex Acquires Leapfin To Push From Moving Money Into Closing The Books, Airwallex

🏃 The Rundown: Last week Airwallex acquired Leapfin, a California revenue-recognition and reconciliation platform, for an undisclosed sum. It’s Airwallex’s second acquisition of the year, following Korea’s Paynuri, and builds on a partnership the two struck in 2025. Leapfin’s team, including its co-founders, joins Airwallex.

🥡 Takeaway: Airwallex started life in Australia as a cross-border payments play, then spent years layering on accounts, cards, treasury, and spend. What began as a single product is now a full business finance platform, which puts it up against the business arms of Wise and Revolut, and infrastructure players like Nium. And the deeper Airwallex pushes into the US, the more it runs into Brex, Mercury, and the rest of the home-grown business-banking pack, right as they keep expanding too. Leapfin pushes it past moving money into accounting for it, the revenue-recognition and reconciliation work that happens after a payment settles. Jack Zhang framed it as closing the loop from accepting a payment to closing the books, which is a fair description of what they’ve just bought.

Airwallex is becoming a hungry acquirer, two deals this year, buying capability rather than building it. For a company that built most of its early stack in-house, that’s a change in how it grows. Record-to-report is unglamorous, finance-team plumbing, but it’s sticky in a way payments isn’t. Once your revenue numbers close inside a vendor’s system, that’s not something you rip out on a whim.

It also rhymes with a pattern across fintech scaleups. The land grab has moved from “move the money” to “own everything that touches the money,” the workflows sitting on either side of the transaction. It’s what I like to call the wallets to workflows strategy. Those same US players are pushing into accounting-adjacent territory from the spend side, while Airwallex comes at it from cross-border payments. Different starting points, same destination, which is to be the system of record for a company’s finances rather than just the rail the money runs on.

Where this gets interesting is how these players attack the next real battleground, the back office. Payments keeps commoditising, margins compress, and everyone has the rails. The defensible part is the software wrapped around them, and the accounting layer is about as defensible as it gets, because switching it is genuinely painful. That’s worth more over time than another basis point on an FX spread.

🪙 Deel Launches A Stablecoin Wallet So Contractors Can Get Paid And Hold In Dollars, Deel

🏃 The Rundown: Last week Deel launched a stablecoin wallet for contractors, letting workers in 150-plus countries hold, earn yield on, and spend a US-dollar balance. It’s built on Stripe’s Bridge for the stablecoin, Privy for the embedded wallets, and Tempo for the chain. The rollout starts in Argentina, then the rest of Latin America, with APAC, MENA, and Africa to follow, and a Deel card to spend the balance is coming later this year.

🥡 Takeaway: This is the clearest example yet of stablecoins solving a real problem rather than chasing one. Deel pays contractors in dozens of countries, and a lot of the people on the receiving end live with currencies that lose value by the week and banking systems that make holding dollars hard. A USD-backed balance they can hold, earn on, and spend is a genuine upgrade over getting paid into a local account that’s worth less by the time it clears.

Starting in Argentina is a fascinating decision from the Deel team. Argentines have wanted dollar exposure for decades, and the informal “blue dollar” market exists precisely because the official channels don’t work. Deel is plugging a dollar account into a payroll flow people already use, which is a much easier sell than convincing someone to go download a crypto app. The stablecoin is invisible plumbing here. The user just sees a dollar balance.

For those curious, the stack underneath is: Stripe’s Bridge for issuance, Privy for wallets, Tempo for the chain, all Stripe-owned or Stripe-adjacent now. Stripe spent the last 18 months buying up the stablecoin infrastructure layer, and Deel is exactly the kind of distribution that makes those acquisitions pay off. Deel brings the workers, Stripe brings the rails.

Nobody on Deel is asking for a stablecoin. They’re asking to get paid in something that holds its value, and stablecoins happen to be the best way to deliver that across 150 countries. This is the stablecoin thesis actually playing out. Chef’s kiss.

💳 Adyen Takes GOV.UK Pay Off Stripe, Cards And Pay By Bank Included, Adyen

🏃 The Rundown: Last week the UK’s Government Digital Service named Adyen as the new payment provider for GOV.UK Pay, covering non-Crown card payments and pay by bank, replacing Stripe. Around 1,000 public sector services, including local councils, police forces, and the armed forces, will migrate to Adyen under a three-year contract worth up to £25m. Services already running on Worldpay are unaffected.

🥡 Takeaway: Government processing contracts are about as unglamorous as fintech gets, but this one is a real competitive scalp for Adyen. GOV.UK Pay is the shared rail councils, police forces, and the armed forces use to collect money from citizens, and it sat with Stripe. Losing it in an open tender, on home turf in Europe, is the kind of result that gets noticed inside Stripe. Adyen winning it says the single-platform, direct-processing pitch that wins it big enterprise merchants now lands with public sector buyers too.

The part worth flagging is that the mandate explicitly covered pay by bank alongside cards. Account-to-account payments have spent years looking for everyday use cases that stick, and a government collecting citizen payments straight from bank accounts is about as everyday as it gets. It also saves the public purse the card interchange on a very large volume of small payments. When the state starts routing its collections through open banking rails, that does more to normalise pay by bank than another fintech launch ever could.

Public procurement is increasingly (if still slowly) reading the payments market the way enterprises do, valuing reliability, a single integration, and direct access to the rails over the developer-first wedge. Different buyers reward different strengths, and on a tender judged on operational resilience and breadth, Adyen’s model fits the brief.

The bit I like most is the plain fact of it. Under the new deal, public sector organisations, local councils, the armed forces, the police, transition off Stripe and onto Adyen for their GOV.UK Pay processing. Stripe tends to get treated as the inevitable winner in modern payments, but when the buyer is a government weighing reliability and breadth over the slickest API, Adyen and the likes of Checkout.com win their share. It’s a healthy reminder that not everything in payments runs through Stripe.

🌐 OpenFX Buys Amsterdam’s Embed To Get European And UK Licences Of Its Own, OpenFX

🏃 The Rundown: Last week OpenFX, the US cross-border payments firm, agreed to acquire Amsterdam-based embedded-payments company Embed. The deal brings two regulated entities, a Dutch payment institution that passports across the EEA and a UK e-money licence, plus virtual IBAN issuance and SEPA and UK Faster Payments connectivity. OpenFX is also opening offices in London and Amsterdam and pursuing a MiCAR licence. Terms weren’t disclosed.

🥡 Takeaway: This feels like a fintech buying its way into a regulatory footprint, and it’s one of the cleaner examples of what the game actually looks like in fintech, even if it’s under-discussed. The hard part of cross-border isn’t the technology. It’s the licences and the direct access to local rails (IYKYK, everything changes when you can settle directly). OpenFX could build a slick FX product in a quarter. Getting regulated to move euros inside the EEA and pounds across UK Faster Payments takes years, or one acquisition.

What Embed gives OpenFX is direct access rather than rented access. Plenty of fintechs reach European rails by sitting on top of a local partner who holds the licence and takes margin for the privilege. Owning the Dutch payment institution and the UK e-money licence outright means OpenFX integrates with the pipes directly, on its own terms, without a middleman that can reprice it. The usual path is to start by working through partners to reach the rails, then over time earn the licences that let you go direct. OpenFX skipped the slow version by writing a cheque.

The wider read is consolidation. We covered OpenFX raising $94m not so long ago, and here it is spending the proceeds on regulated infrastructure. Capital in this segment is increasingly going toward acquiring licences and live rails rather than building features, because the features are easy and the regulated access is the moat. And in the year 2026, it’s quickly becoming one of the few moats left standing. It has never been hard to ship a payments UI. The magic is in the boring, licensed plumbing underneath, and that’s exactly what’s being bought and sold right now.

🤖 Worldline And ING Run A Live Agentic Payment On Europe’s Existing Rails, Worldline

🏃 The Rundown: Last week at Money20/20 Europe, Worldline, ING, and Mastercard said they had completed an end-to-end agentic payment in production, an AI agent buying concert tickets on behalf of an ING cardholder, with the customer approving the purchase. The same setup is running in the Netherlands and Belgium across Mastercard’s network.

🥡 Takeaway: Most of the agentic-payments news this year has been frameworks and announcements, protocols shipped, sandboxes opened, demos run on a conference stage. This is one of the first few we’ve seen run the whole chain in production across a major European network, acceptance, acquiring, authentication, and issuer processing, on a live transaction with a real cardholder. The gap between “we have a protocol” and “money moved through the existing rails” is the one that matters, and this closes a bit of it.

What’s notable is that it ran on the rails that already exist. There was a temptation in agentic payments to assume agents would need some new native payment system built for machines. What Worldline and ING are showing is that an AI-initiated transaction can route through the same Mastercard plumbing a human card payment uses, with the agent slotting in at the front and the consumer approving at the point of action. In that version, the existing networks don’t get disintermediated. They carry the agentic volume too.

I’d keep the excitement at the right level. One concert-ticket purchase in the Netherlands is a proof point, not a market. The genuinely hard parts of agentic commerce, getting consumers comfortable handing a card to an agent, the liability questions when an agent buys the wrong thing, the fraud surface, are all still ahead. But Europe usually lags the US on this kind of thing, so seeing a live production transaction here, on real rails, earlier than I’d have guessed, is a reasonable signal that agentic payments are moving from the conference stage to the checkout faster than the timelines suggested.

🚀 Gradient Labs Raises Its Series A To $26M For Compliance-Native AI Agents, Gradient Labs

🏃 The Rundown: Gradient Labs, a London startup building autonomous AI agents that run customer operations for banks, announced its Series A had grown to $26m, doubling an earlier round through a fresh extension co-led by Octopus Ventures and CommerzVentures, with Redpoint Ventures and Exceptional Capital following on.

🥡 Takeaway: Gradient Labs sits in the part of the AI-agent wave that actually fits regulated finance, with compliance-native agents that handle onboarding, support, and back-office ops. Banks won’t point a general-purpose consumer LLM at their compliance workflows, but an agent built from the ground up around the controls and audit trails they need is a different proposition. Still a hard one, but closer to what they’re used to.

The thesis sitting underneath this round seems straightforward. Agents are good at exactly the repetitive, high-volume operational work that banks currently throw headcount at. We saw versions of it with HockeyStack and Modus earlier this year. Gradient is the regulated-finance-native cut of the same idea, building for the controls a bank actually needs rather than bolting compliance onto a general model after the fact. In a sector where operations is one of the largest cost lines, that’s a big market to go after.

The question I think many are still battling with is the vertical vs horizontal agent approach to this segment, and in something this regulated I lean vertical, at least early, because the controls and audit trails are the hard part and they are easier to build for than to retrofit.

🚀 Forage Raises $40M To Run The Rails For Government Benefits At Checkout, PR Newswire

🏃 The Rundown: Forage, a US payments company that lets retailers and delivery platforms accept government benefits like SNAP and EBT, announced a $40m Series B at a $225m valuation, led by Mouro Capital, with Nyca Partners, PayPal Ventures, and Intuit Ventures among the participants. It takes total funding to $75m.

🥡 Takeaway: Forage works one of the more under-served niches in payments, the rails for accepting government benefits. SNAP and EBT acceptance is a genuinely hard integration. The rules vary, the systems are old, and most processors never bothered. Forage built the layer that lets stores from Dollar General to DoorDash and Uber Eats take benefits at checkout, which quietly opens up grocery spend for tens of millions of low-income families.

It’s a good reminder that not all of the interesting fintech is chasing the same affluent customer. There’s real volume, and real social value, in plumbing that serves people the mainstream payments stack mostly ignored. The move into a consumer savings app is the part to watch, because going from “accept benefits” to “help these households save” is a logical next step and a far stickier relationship than just being the rail at the till.

🎧 What’s Finally Changing To Help Catch More Financial Crime, Fintech One-on-One (June 4, 2026)

Peter Renton talks to ComplyAdvantage’s Andrew Davies, a three-decade financial-crime veteran, about why the industry still catches less than 2% of the money laundered globally and where AI and data-sharing consortiums could actually move that number. Davies has been building this stuff since the 90s and is refreshingly specific about what works versus what’s just compliance theatre. Well worth a listen.

🎧 The Disbursements Playbook, Leaders in Payments (June 2, 2026)

Greg Myers sits down with Dash Solutions CEO Stephen Faust on disbursements, the unglamorous business of paying people out, refunds, reimbursements, royalties, wages, and why it’s quietly one of the faster-growing corners of payments. Good listen if you spend more time thinking about how money comes in than how it goes out. Add this one to your playlist.

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If you’re new, here is a breakdown of what you can expect from each issue.

If you missed our recent editions, you can catch up here. Some previous issues you might want to check out if you’re new include “A Deep Dive Into The Cash App's Growth Machine”, “The Future Of Payment Initiation”, and “Current: Doing It Differently”.

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💳 Mastercard Gets Its Own New York BitLicense For Stablecoin Settlement, CoinDesk

🏃 The Rundown: Last week the New York State Department of Financial Services granted a BitLicense to Mastercard Transaction Services (U.S.) LLC, Mastercard’s licensed US subsidiary. The license lets Mastercard directly transmit and settle stablecoins and tokenized deposits rather than routing through a third-party licensed intermediary. NYDFS has issued fewer than 50 BitLicenses since the framework launched in 2015, putting Mastercard alongside the likes of Coinbase, Circle, Galaxy, and Anchorage.

🥡 Takeaway: This is the move that turns Mastercard’s stablecoin talk into infrastructure it actually owns. Until now, a network that wanted to touch stablecoin settlement leaned on a licensed partner to handle the regulated part. Holding its own BitLicense means Mastercard can sit on the regulated rails directly, set its own terms, and stop paying margin to an intermediary that can reprice or restrict it on its own timeline.

It also reads as the back half of the BVNK deal. Mastercard agreed to buy the stablecoin payments firm BVNK for $1.8 billion back in March, and a number that size makes a lot more sense once you hold the license that lets you run the thing yourself. The pattern across the networks is consistent now. Visa has been pushing its own stablecoin settlement, Mastercard bought BVNK and now holds the license to operate it, and the throughline is a familiar one: the schemes want to own the full stack, not rent the regulated parts of it from someone else.

That leaves the standalone stablecoin infrastructure companies in an awkward spot. For a couple of years the pitch was that the networks were too slow and too card-centric to move on-chain, so a wave of startups built the regulated settlement layer on their behalf. Mastercard holding its own BitLicense closes that window. The networks aren’t outsourcing the regulated layer, they’re absorbing it, and the startups that filled the gap are now building on ground the schemes have decided to take back.

The driver underneath it is revenue. Core card growth is flattening in the mature markets, so Visa and Mastercard keep moving up the stack into new lines, value-added services, fraud and identity, and now settlement itself. Owning stablecoin and tokenised-deposit rails isn’t really a crypto play. It’s where the schemes go looking for the next leg of growth once card swipes stop compounding the way they used to.

🤖 Robinhood Opens Its Platform To AI Agents With Agentic Trading And An Agentic Credit Card, Robinhood

🏃 The Rundown: Last week Robinhood opened its platform to third-party AI agents through two products. Agentic Trading lets customers connect an external AI agent to a dedicated trading account, kept separate from their main portfolio, starting with equities in beta and with options, crypto, event contracts, and futures to follow. The Agentic Credit Card connects an agent to a virtual Robinhood Gold Card with user-set spending limits, walled off from the customer’s primary card. Both run through Robinhood’s Model Context Protocol servers, and users get a push notification on every action and can disconnect with one tap.

🥡 Takeaway: If you’ve been tracking the agentic payments thread in FR this year, this is another data point pointing in the same direction. Stripe shipped its Machine Payments Protocol for agent-to-business checkout, Meow gave agents bank accounts to operate, Amex shipped a developer kit for them, and now Robinhood has handed agents both a brokerage account and a card, with guardrails wrapped around each. The bigger move, though, is structural. Robinhood is opening the platform up and handing the action layer to outside agents and AI assistants like Claude. Through the MCP servers, it becomes the broker an agent plugs into when a user tells their assistant to invest or spend, rather than the app a human opens to do it themselves. Robinhood is betting on where the point of action goes next.

There are two ways to read that bet. The cynical one is that agentic features are what every fintech is shipping right now, and Robinhood doesn’t want to be the broker that wasn’t ready when the assistants came knocking. The expansive one is the bet worth taking seriously. If agents end up running most financial activity, transacting continuously, at machine speed, across far more decisions than a person would ever make by hand, the total volume could dwarf everything humans have transacted to date. The platforms that win that world are the ones agents can already operate natively, and opening up now, well before the demand properly exists, is Robinhood trying to be the default execution venue for when it arrives. Equities-only in beta looks modest, but the bet was never about today’s volume. It’s about being the broker agents route through once they are doing the bulk of the trading.

🌐 PayPal And Tencent Link Up So PayPal Users Can Pay At WeChat Pay Merchants In China, Tencent

🏃 The Rundown: Last week Tencent’s TenPay Global and PayPal announced a tie-up through PayPal World that lets PayPal users pay at tens of millions of Weixin Pay (WeChat Pay) merchants across China by scanning a QR code in their existing PayPal wallet, with no new app to download. The rollout starts with US PayPal users. Tencent paired it with a 90-day waiver on the 3% processing fee for first-time international card users and in-app payment guidance in 16 languages, ahead of APEC 2026 in Shenzhen.

🥡 Takeaway: Wallet interoperability has been the great unfulfilled promise of payments for a decade, and this is one of the more meaningful cracks in the wall. Two of the largest wallet networks on the planet, one with deep merchant coverage in China and one with deep consumer reach in the West, are letting their users transact across the boundary without anyone downloading anything new. For an American tourist in Shanghai who has spent years locked out of a near-cashless economy that runs on Weixin Pay and Alipay, that’s a genuine unlock.

The framing that matters is PayPal World as the connective layer. PayPal isn’t trying to win Chinese consumers or sign Chinese merchants here. It’s positioning its network as the interoperability hub that lets wallets plug into one another, with this as the marquee example. That’s a smarter use of PayPal’s asset than competing head-on in markets it was never going to crack. Under the new CEO, PayPal increasingly looks like it wants to be the rails between wallets rather than just another wallet in the stack.

The timing is not subtle. APEC in Shenzhen hands Tencent a captive wave of inbound visitors and a reason to make foreigner payments work smoothly, and the fee waivers and 16-language support are aimed squarely at that crowd. The open question is whether this stays a tourist-corridor product or grows into genuine two-way interoperability. Right now it’s PayPal users paying in China. The version that really matters is the one that runs in both directions, and at scale.

🏛️ Visa Commits Another €500m To Europe, Building Local Rails And Courting “Systemically Important” Status, Visa

🏃 The Rundown: Last week Visa committed an additional €500m to Europe over the next decade, with the centrepiece a new Eurozone data centre that will process European transactions locally. It is also opening a Frankfurt headquarters for its Eurozone branch and a Warsaw technology centre in 2027, and it expects to be designated a Systemically Important Payment System under European Central Bank oversight.

🥡 Takeaway: This is Visa reading the room in Europe. For years the political pressure in the EU has centred on payments sovereignty, the worry that the continent runs its card economy on two American networks while the homegrown alternative (Wero, the EPI project) is still finding its feet. Visa’s answer isn’t to fight that narrative. It’s to localise hard enough that the “foreign infrastructure” critique loses its teeth.

The data centre is the substantive bit and super interesting. Processing European transactions inside the Eurozone, settling in euros through T2, and accepting designation as a systemically important payment system under ECB oversight is Visa volunteering to be regulated as critical European infrastructure. That’s a notable thing for a US network to sign up for. It trades away some autonomy for a far more durable position, because once you’re woven into the Eurosystem’s plumbing and supervised as critical infrastructure, you become very hard to displace, sovereignty push or not — or so I’d imagine their thinking goes.

The Frankfurt headquarters and the Warsaw tech centre are the softer half of the same play: jobs, investment, and innovation labs that make Visa look like a European employer rather than a tollbooth. €500m over a decade isn’t a huge number for a company Visa’s size, but the signal matters more than the sum. The way I read it, this is defensive spending against a regulatory and political risk that has been building for years, and it is a lot cheaper than waiting for Wero or a mandated domestic scheme to take share.

📱 Monzo Launches “Monzo Mobile,” An eSIM Phone Plan Built Into The Banking App, Mobile Industry Review

🏃 The Rundown: Last week Monzo announced Monzo Mobile, an eSIM mobile plan plugged directly into its banking app, powered by an exclusive partnership with Virgin Media O2 for UK coverage and 1GLOBAL for international roaming. Plans start at £8 a month, with a 5% annual loyalty discount that compounds to a maximum 30% off after six years. The waitlist opened to Monzo’s 15 million-plus UK customers, with a full launch slated for summer 2026.

🥡 Takeaway: Monzo selling phone plans is the neobank-as-everything-app thesis showing up in the most British way possible. Revolut got into mobile plans, and now Monzo is following with an eSIM service that sits inside the banking app, where your phone bill lands right next to the rest of your spending. For a bank with 15 million customers, mobile is a logical next monthly bill to capture.

The detail I like is the pricing model. Most telcos run the classic trick of a cheap headline rate that creeps up after the intro period, betting you won’t switch. Monzo has inverted it, with a 5% loyalty discount every year, so an £8 plan drifts down to £7.60, then £7.22, capped at 30% off after six years. It’s a small thing, but it’s a neat encapsulation of why challengers win the trust game. They make money by keeping you happy rather than by counting on your inertia.

Whether this moves the needle financially is another question. MVNO margins are thin and Monzo is reselling someone else’s network, so this isn’t a high-margin business on its own. The point is engagement and primacy. Every extra thing you run through the Monzo app, your salary, your spending, now your phone bill, makes Monzo more central to your financial life and harder to leave. That’s the real prize. The phone plan is just another hook into the primary relationship.

🚀 Daloopa Raises $47M Series C For The Data Layer Behind AI-Driven Finance, PR Newswire

🏃 The Rundown: Daloopa, a New York financial-data infrastructure company, announced a $47m Series C led by Brighton Park Capital, with Squarepoint Capital, Touring Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners participating. The round takes total funding past $100m.

🥡 Takeaway: Daloopa sits in an unglamorous but increasingly valuable spot: the structured-data layer that AI investment workflows run on. Agents and models are only as good as the financial data they can pull, and getting clean, normalised numbers out of filings, decks, and reports at scale is genuinely hard. As more of the buy-side leans on AI for first-pass analysis, demand for accurate, machine-readable financial data goes up, not down.

It rhymes with a broader point running through fintech right now. The flashy layer is the model or the agent, but the durable value often sits in the data plumbing underneath (or maybe that’s always been the case). Daloopa is betting that being the reliable feed behind AI-driven finance is a better business than building the front end, and there’s a real argument it’s right.

🚀 Capchase Raises $200M+ And Launches An AI-Native Vendor-Financing Product, Business Wire

🏃 The Rundown: Capchase, the New York embedded-financing platform, announced more than $200m in new funding, a mix of equity and debt warehouse facilities and its largest raise to date. Backers include QED Investors, Invesco, Thomvest, 01 Advisors, and Caffeinated Capital. It also launched a new AI-native product for financing enterprise-software deals.

🥡 Takeaway: Capchase has quietly become the financing layer underneath a lot of B2B software sales, the thing that lets a vendor offer “pay monthly” while still getting paid upfront. The bulk of this raise is debt rather than equity, which is the tell that the lending book is growing and needs funding, not that the company is short on runway.

The AI-native product is the part worth watching. Underwriting and structuring software-deal financing is exactly the kind of repetitive, data-heavy work agents are good at, and building that into the financing flow is how Capchase widens the gap on slower, more manual rivals. Embedded B2B lending fell out of fashion for a while after the 2022 funding reset, so a raise this size is also a sign the segment has found its feet again.

🎧 Stablecoins, AI Agents, And The Future Of Global Banking, The a16z Show (May 28, 2026)

Angela Strange talks to Jeeves founder Dileep Thazhmon about building stablecoin-native banking for businesses across 25 Latin American countries, and why adoption is running ahead there compared to the US. He gets specific about the regulatory and underwriting grind behind making cross-border money movement actually work, which is where most of these conversations stay vague. Well worth a listen.

🎧 Edward Woodford On Zerohash’s Trust Bank Charter Bid And The Regulated Plumbing Behind Crypto, Fintech Business Podcast (May 27, 2026)

Jason Mikula sits down with Zerohash founder Edward Woodford on why the company is applying for a national trust bank charter, how the CLARITY Act could reshape US crypto, and the line between crypto as an asset class and crypto as software. Woodford is refreshingly direct about where the regulation is actually heading versus the noise around it. Add this one to your playlist.

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🤖 OpenAI Launches Personal Finance For ChatGPT, Plugged In Through Plaid, TechCrunch

🏃 The Rundown: Last week OpenAI launched a personal finance experience inside ChatGPT for US Pro subscribers, letting users connect bank, card, brokerage, and loan accounts through Plaid across 12,000+ institutions. The feature is read-only, runs on GPT-5.5, and surfaces a dashboard of portfolio performance, spending, subscriptions, and upcoming payments, with Intuit integration on the way.

🥡 Takeaway: We now know what the Hiro acquisition from Issue #155 was actually about. Three weeks after announcing the deal, OpenAI has shipped what is, in effect, the end of the standalone PFM app. Think every company that built a categorise-and-dashboard product has just had a much bigger competitor with a meaningfully better starting position drop into their category. Gone are the days of the standalone PFM app. It is just a Skill.md file now, to recycle heading from a few issues back.

The more interesting angle is what this tells you about how AI is finding its way into fintech. Consumers were already asking ChatGPT money questions every day I’m sure. OpenAI didn’t create that behaviour, they just made it dramatically easier by giving the model access to the actual account data sitting behind the question. The AI labs aren’t picking off fintech categories from a strategy deck. They are noticing where consumer behaviour has already migrated into their products and plumbing the rails in to support it. PFM is the obvious example because the conversation was already happening unaided.

The structural take for the plumbing layer is the same point in reverse. Open banking connectivity has always been a commodity business and a race to the bottom on price. The AI labs needing standardised, normalised, multi-bank account data has flipped that script for now, but the smart move from the connectivity providers isn’t to sit and enjoy the temporary tailwind. It’s to use it to build a layer on top of the plumbing that the AI labs can’t easily replicate, which is what Plaid seems to be doing. See below for the longer version of how.

🏛️ Trump Signs Executive Order Telling Federal Regulators To Make Room For Fintechs (And Open Fed Rails), White House

🏃 The Rundown: Last week President Trump signed Executive Order 14405, directing every federal financial regulator (CFPB, CFTC, FDIC, OCC, NCUA, SEC) to run a 90-day review of regulations and supervisory practices that “unduly impede” fintech firms from partnering with banks or seeking charters, with each agency required to act on the findings within 180 days. The Order also requests that the Federal Reserve run a 120-day evaluation of access to Reserve Bank payment accounts and services for non-bank fintechs, digital asset firms, and direct participants in real-time payment networks. Where existing law already permits direct access, the Fed has been asked to publish transparent procedures and decide complete applications within 90 days.

🥡 Takeaway: This is the policy version of what the OCC has already been doing on the charter side. This and last year’s surge in de novo charter applications (e.g. Augustus, Erebor, Bunq, Mercury, Nubank, and the rest) was the market saying it wanted direct access to the pipes. The Executive Order is the administration saying the pipes are about to be more accessible.

The thing that genuinely matters is the Fed master account review. Direct access to settlement rails means payment companies can stop renting Fedwire and FedNow through a sponsor bank that takes a margin and sets the terms. Cheaper, faster, and most importantly not at the whim of an intermediary that can reprice or de-platform you on its own timeline.

Patrick Collison’s read on the EO landed the point best. The US is the only G7 country where regulated payments companies can’t directly access government-run settlement rails. Fixing it decouples “quotidian payments activity” from “fractional reserve banking/leverage/maturity transformation”, and the upside is lower systemic risk, more competition, and lower fees. The framing matters because this isn’t really a deregulation story, it’s a structural fix that has been a long time coming.

What this changes is the calculus for any fintech still running a partner bank strategy. Getting off the partner bank model has historically been complex and uncertain enough that most players didn’t bother, even when the limitations (paying margin to the intermediary, building around someone else’s risk committee, living with re-pricing risk) got obvious. What’s different now is that a few things are happening at once: a meaningful cohort of fintechs are hitting scale where the economics of the partner-bank model actually pinch, and EOs has cracked open a real window for those that want their own charter or direct settlement access. For anyone in that camp, this seems to be the moment.

🧠 Plaid Effects 2026: Foundation Models, Agent Tooling, And A Pivot From Connectivity To Intelligence, Plaid

🏃 The Rundown: Plaid wrapped its Effects 2026 conference last week with a product update centred on CEO Zach Perret’s framing of the company’s move from connectivity layer to intelligence layer. The intelligence push covered new Foundation Models trained on Plaid’s network data, a refreshed Trust Index for fraud, a transformer-rebuilt Income product, and an updated LendScore. Plaid also stepped into risk-bearing products for the first time, with Guaranteed Payments and a Cash Advance Index aimed at earned-wage-access providers. On the developer side, Plaid shipped Sandbox Studio, a CLI, and MCP servers for AI agent integration.

🥡 Takeaway: Last week’s most interesting fintech announcement might not be the OpenAI x Plaid partnership at the top of this issue. It might be what Plaid said at their Effects conference two days later. The volume alone is impressive (this wasn’t a single new product, it was a coordinated push across intelligence, risk, and developer tooling all in the same week), but the bigger story is what it adds up to strategically.

The original Plaid business, data connectivity, has been slowly commoditising for years. Banks are increasingly building their own open banking endpoints, FDX standards are making it easier to integrate without a middleman, and pricing only moves in one direction from here. Effects 2026 is Plaid’s answer. Don’t try to defend the connectivity moat indefinitely, build an intelligence layer on top of the network that the connectivity-only competitors structurally can’t replicate. Foundation Models trained on Plaid’s network data are the cleanest example. Anyone with their own data pipes still has to build their own model, train it on a narrower dataset, and probably end up materially behind.

The Guaranteed Payments move is the other big shift. Plaid going from a data-only role into actually taking on risk and guaranteeing settlement outcomes is a different kind of business. The margins are richer but the operating discipline changes, because you’re now pricing risk rather than just moving information about it. Pairing that with Trust Index 3 makes the bet legible: Plaid believes its data advantage on the fraud and risk side is now large enough to underwrite the outcomes, not just describe them.

The MCP servers and the CLI are the agent-tooling bet, and they line up with the OpenAI launch in a way that probably wasn’t accidental. The pitch to AI developers building financial products is straightforward: Plaid is the connectivity layer your agent will reach for, the intelligence layer that interprets what it sees, and increasingly the risk layer that lets it transact. That stack, if Plaid can land it, is meaningfully harder to disintermediate than the original “connect to a bank account” pitch ever was. The bear case is that the foundation model approach to financial data is exactly the kind of thing the AI labs themselves will eventually want to own. The bull case is that Plaid has the network position that makes them the most likely default until that fight actually starts.

💳 NMI Acquires Dwolla To Add Account-To-Account Rails To Its Embedded Payments Platform, Business Wire

🏃 The Rundown: Last week NMI acquired Dwolla, the API-first account-to-account payments provider, for undisclosed terms. Combined annual transaction volume sits at close to $700 billion. Dwolla CEO Dave Glaser becomes COO at NMI, and 60 Dwolla employees and 400+ customers move across. The deal extends NMI’s embedded payments platform into ACH, RTP, FedNow, and open banking rails.

🥡 Takeaway: A2A is gaining real momentum across the major platforms. Stripe has Pay by Bank, Adyen has its A2A push, Plaid sits underneath most of the consumer-facing experiences, eBay rolled out the TrueLayer integration in the UK that we covered back in Issue #148, and now NMI is buying the long-standing US pure-play to bolt onto its embedded stack. The pattern is consistent: everyone with serious volume is adding a non-card alternative on their roadmap, the assets in the space are starting to find both value and actual use, and the buyers are increasingly choosing acquisition over build.

The other piece is what NMI itself is becoming. Six acquisitions deep, the platform now covers onboarding, acceptance, orchestration, FedNow, RTP, ACH, A2A, and open banking through a single white-label interface. ISOs and ISVs that ten years ago would have stitched together a gateway, a processor, and three different bank partners can now buy a single layer that does all of it. It is the same playbook Fiserv ran with First Data, just compressed and tilted toward platform partners rather than direct merchants. The $700 billion combined run-rate isn’t Stripe-or-Adyen scale, but it is enough to matter for the channel partners NMI sells through.

The bit I’d be watching is whether merchants actually shift volume off cards onto A2A in the next 12-18 months. The economic case has always been there (lower fees, faster settlement, no chargeback friction) but US consumer behaviour hasn’t followed in the way it has in markets with Pix in Brazil or UPI in India. The infrastructure being in place doesn’t tell you anything about adoption. It does tell you the platforms are betting adoption is coming, and they want to be the ones with the rail when it does.

🚀 Mercury Raises $200m Series D At $5.2bn Valuation, Mercury

🏃 The Rundown: Business banking fintech Mercury raised $200m in a Series D last week led by TCV, with existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, CRV, Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia, and Spark Capital. The round values Mercury at $5.2bn, up from $3.5bn at the March Series C.

🥡 Takeaway: Mercury is now one of three multi-billion dollar outcomes in a segment few people thought would produce more than one winner. Capital One paid $5.15bn for Brex back in January, Ramp is comfortably in the high teens on the secondaries, and Mercury has just printed at $5.2bn with revenue still compounding. Business banking for startups, the category most of the industry wrote off as a single-winner take-all market a few years ago, has quietly produced a real ecosystem.

The Mercury announcement itself was also as much about AI as it was about the charter. Immad’s framing on the round, including the TBPN interview the same day, leaned hard into AI-driven business formation, LLM recommendations as a customer acquisition channel, and the role of agents inside the product surface. The charter is part of why the round exists (operating a national bank isn’t cheap), but the bigger thread is what Mercury thinks the next chapter of business banking looks like once agents are doing half of what the customer-facing team used to do themselves.

🛡️ Sardine Raises $25m Series C Extension Led By National Bank Of Canada, Coupled With A Multi-Year Enterprise Deal, FinTech Futures

🏃 The Rundown: Agentic risk and financial crime platform Sardine raised a $25m Series C extension last week led by National Bank of Canada via its corporate venture arm NAventures, bringing total funding to $170m. NBC is simultaneously rolling out Sardine across its retail, commercial, and wealth divisions under a multi-year partnership.

🥡 Takeaway: Fraud, KYC, and risk decisioning are the parts of the bank stack where AI is generating measurable ROI today, not on some 2027 roadmap. The incumbents are starting to look genuinely exposed, and the NBC deal validates the buy-side appetite at a scale that Sardine’s previous rounds didn’t quite get to. NBC going live across retail, commercial, and wealth in one go is a bigger commitment than the typical single-product pilot, and that kind of reference customer makes the procurement conversation easier elsewhere.

The broader point is that agentic risk is shaping up as one of the cleanest applications of AI in financial services. The data is structured, the feedback loops are tight, and the metrics that matter (false positive rates, fraud caught, time to decision) are all measurable.

🎧 Mercury CEO Immad Akhund On The $200m Series D, AI-Driven Business Formation, And LLM Recommendations As A Customer Acquisition Channel, TBPN (May 20, 2026)

Immad Akhund joined John Coogan and Jordi Hays on TBPN the same day Mercury announced its $200m round, and the segment goes well beyond the press release. The bit that stood out for me is his read on LLM recommendations driving a meaningful slice of new customer signups: founders ask ChatGPT (or whichever assistant they default to) which business banking platform to use, the model recommends Mercury, and the funnel just keeps filling itself. If you’ve been thinking about how AI changes acquisition for fintechs, this segment is the live case study. Well worth a listen.

🎧 The Bank Account Is The Product: Slash’s Bet On Vertical SMB Banking, Tearsheet Podcast (May 20, 2026)

Slash walks Tearsheet through the vertical SMB banking thesis the company has been building toward since the $100m Series C earlier this year (we covered that in Issue #155). The argument lines up neatly with the wallets to workflows thesis I’ve been yapping about: the generalist “business banking for everyone” play is harder to defend now that Mercury, Brex, Ramp, and Aspire have all carved out their own positions, and the next leg of the category is built around very specific operator personas where the bank account is the entry point to a full set of workflows. Add this one to your playlist.

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If you’re new, here is a breakdown of what you can expect from each issue.

If you missed our recent editions, you can catch up here. Some previous issues you might want to check out if you’re new include “A Deep Dive Into The Cash App's Growth Machine”, “The Future Of Payment Initiation”, and “Current: Doing It Differently”.

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🏦 Augustus Gets OCC Conditional Approval For The First AI-Native Clearing Bank, Banking Dive

🏃 The Rundown: Last week the OCC granted conditional approval to Augustus (formerly Ivy) to establish Augustus Bank, N.A., a US national bank built around stablecoin and AI-native clearing of major Western currencies for global financial institutions. Founded in 2022 and backed by Peter Thiel, Augustus already holds European banking licences and clears euros for clients including Kraken.

🥡 Takeaway: What makes Augustus genuinely different from the run of fintech charter stories this year is that it isn’t a fintech trying to ditch its sponsor bank, and it isn’t a crypto company looking for direct access to Fedwire. It’s a clearing bank, the plumbing every cross-border payment runs through. And that distinction matters, because clearing is the part of the stack everyone has quietly ignored for decades.

That layer has barely changed in forty years. Same correspondent banking, same batch processing, same multi-day wait for money to actually arrive on the other side. The pitch from Augustus’s CEO Diederik Dabitz is that the legacy stack was built for humans operating during business hours, with cross-border settlement that can still take two to five days end to end. The AI era doesn’t work that way. If you assume agents are going to initiate, approve, and reconcile transactions at machine speed, then a clearing system gated by a call centre and 4pm settlement windows becomes the bottleneck.

In what feels like a sign of the times, Augustus has framed the company up as “securing Western currency dominance.” That reads less as economic strategy and more as a calculated appeal to the jingoistic mood in Washington, where Western currency primacy is exactly the kind of imperative the leaders who matter right now want to hear. The substance is there if you want it: if the future of money movement runs on stablecoins, whoever issues and clears them shapes which currencies the global agent economy defaults to. But the packaging is doing most of the work. That pitch lands very differently in Washington than it would have a year ago.

Two things to watch from here. First, the conditional approval is not the full charter. Augustus still has to clear the OCC’s pre-opening conditions and get sign-off from the Fed for a master account before any of this is operational. Second, this only really matters if Augustus can persuade banks and large fintechs to actually clear through them instead of through JPMorgan or Citi. The technology is the easy part. The relationship work is where these things usually stall.

💼 Revolut Trading Wins FCA Approval To Move Into Portfolio Management And Private Wealth, FStech

🏃 The Rundown: Last week Revolut secured a Variation of Permissions from the FCA, allowing it to manage investments and deal as principal. The new permissions open the door to managed portfolios, leveraged products, structured investments, and private wealth services aimed at retail, professional, and high-net-worth clients.

🥡 Takeaway: Revolut has always been chasing the super app, and wealth is just the next category on the list. The margins on debit interchange and FX are thin, and once you’re past 20 million customers, growth comes from going deeper with the ones you already have, not adding more. Wealth is where that next leg of margin sits, and stacking it on top of payments, crypto, and savings is a continuation of the same playbook for a company that wants public-markets-grade numbers when it eventually lists.

The structural shift here is from “we’ll execute your trades” to “we’ll manage your money.” That’s a different business. Brokerage is a transactional layer where you compete on price and the user does the work. Portfolio management is a relationship layer where you compete on advice, trust, and reporting, and the customer hands you the wheel. The economics are an order of magnitude better, the churn is lower, and the ceiling on assets per client is much higher.

What’s worth sitting with is the competitive set. The traditional private banks (Coutts, JPMorgan Private, UBS) have been protected for decades by a soft moat: high minimums, relationship managers, polished annual reports, and the implicit signal that having one of these accounts means you’ve made it. Revolut isn’t trying to take that customer head-on. They’re going after the rapidly growing tier below: the affluent professional with a couple of million in liquid assets who has never had a relationship manager because the friction of opening one was higher than the perceived benefit. Plug an AI-driven portfolio recommender into the same app they already use for their day-to-day spending, and the friction collapses.

The bit I’m most curious about is the AI piece. The FCA is structurally cautious about anything that resembles algorithmic advice without a human in the loop, and “AI-driven portfolio recommendation tools” is exactly the language that triggers regulatory scrutiny. Revolut has the regulatory experience to navigate this, but the design choice between “AI surfaces ideas, human approves” and “AI runs the portfolio within set policy” is the real product question. The first is a glorified screener. The second is what the wealth incumbents should actually be worried about.

The next test is what they ship and when. There’s a meaningful difference between a polished private bank brand sitting quietly in a corner of the app, and default-on AI portfolio recommendations for any user who crosses a balance threshold. That second version is where the FCA will pay close attention, and where the wealth incumbents will actually feel pressure.

🤖 MoonPay Acquires Dawn, MoonPay Newsroom

🏃 The Rundown: Last week MoonPay acquired Dawn Labs and launched Dawn CLI, an AI-native trading tool that turns a plain-English strategy into code, backtests it, and executes trades autonomously. Polymarket is the first live integration, with more venues and asset types to come. Dawn CLI runs on non-custodial wallets with policy controls on trade size, position sizing, and market access. Dawn Labs founder Neeraj Prasad joins as Chief Engineer of MoonPay Labs.

🥡 Takeaway: Being great at active trading has always meant being good at three things at once: writing the code to wire up the APIs, designing and stress-testing the strategy, and judging when to deploy, scale, or kill a position. Very few people are good at all three, which is why serious active trading has always been a team sport. AI is what collapses those skills into a single tool, and Dawn is the bet on what that looks like.

The choice of Polymarket as the first platform is interesting. Prediction markets are the rare category where the underlying contracts are public, the resolution criteria are deterministic, the data flow is well-structured, and there’s still significant alpha left in markets because most participants are gut-trading rather than running models (or, in the French case, holding a hairdryer up to the thermometer). That’s a near-ideal environment to demonstrate an AI trading tool: clean data, clean settlement, and a category that’s growing fast enough to absorb new entrants.

For MoonPay specifically, this is a meaningful diversification away from being a pure on/off-ramp business. The four-pillar framing they keep using (fund, tokenise, trade, spend) is them positioning as more than a payments rail. Owning the trading layer for AI agents (with non-custodial wallets, policy controls, and reviewable strategy code baked in from the start) is a higher-margin position than the on-ramp, and while the deal itself is small, the direction it points MoonPay in isn’t.

📲 PhotonPay Completes its First Live Agentic Payment Together with Mastercard, PR Wire

🏃 The Rundown: Last week PhotonPay and Mastercard completed what they’re calling the first live agentic card payment. An AI agent autonomously booked and paid for a ride through travel platform Hoppa using a PhotonPay tokenised card provisioned through Mastercard Agent Pay, with no human in the loop at the moment of execution. The agent authorised the transaction within policy boundaries set ahead of time.

🥡 Takeaway: This is shaping up to be the payments story of the year, and everyone from Stripe through to the schemes (and most of what sits between them) is racing to get their agent on. What’s still genuinely open is who in the stack ends up winning. The PSPs, the wallets, or the schemes? My bet is on whoever sits closest to the customer, because that’s where the magical experience lives. But only time will tell.

The reason I lean that way is straightforward. In an agent-first world the user never really sees the payment, they see the outcome (trip booked, groceries delivered, bill paid), and the agent picks whatever sits underneath. The layer closest to the user is the one that gets to define what default looks like, which is structurally good for wallets and customer-facing fintechs, and less good for anyone whose only job is moving money from A to B. The schemes have known this for years, which is why they’re working so hard to make sure the agent can’t route around them. Whether that holds is the bit worth watching.

🌏 Bunq Files For A Mexican Banking Licence, Bunq Press

🏃 The Rundown: Last week European neobank Bunq filed a banking licence application with Mexican regulator CNBV, marking its first move into Latin America and a deliberate play for the cross-border corridor between Mexico, the US, and Europe. Bunq already operates in 30+ European markets and has its US banking licence application pending. The Mexico filing is framed around serving “global citizens,” digital nomads, expats, and the bi-national workforce that moves between MX, the US, and Europe.

🥡 Takeaway: Bunq has spent a decade building a distinct position in European neobanking, slightly more design-forward than N26, more international than Monzo, more lifestyle than Revolut. Going into Mexico now is a less obvious move than another European market, and it’s worth unpacking why.

The bet is on the corridor, not the country. Mexico has a large bi-national population with the US, a growing digital nomad inflow from the US and Europe (especially in CDMX and the Yucatán), and a remittance market that has historically been served by Western Union, Intermex, and the legacy correspondent banks. None of those incumbents are particularly loved. If Bunq can get a Mexican charter and pair it with its existing European multi-currency wallet, you start to get a genuinely useful product for the customer who lives in two places.

That said, Mexican banking is structurally hard for foreigners. The CNBV licence process is slow, the local distribution game is heavily branch-based outside of CDMX and Monterrey, and Nubank has already built a meaningful presence by going country-by-country in LatAm with vastly more capital and brand. Bunq doesn’t need to be Nubank to win. They need to own the corridor customer specifically, which is a smaller but stickier segment.

What I’ll be watching is whether Bunq’s expansion logic matches the corridor framing. If they actually wire the Mexico product into the European wallet (instant MXN/EUR conversion at interbank, fee-free transfers between the two sides, no separate KYC flows), the product makes sense. If they treat Mexico as a standalone digital bank competing with Nu and Albo, I could see them being a footnote within a couple of years. The corridor read is the one that makes the regulatory cost easiest to justify.

💰 Paymentology Raises $175M Co-Led By Apis And Aspirity, The Next Web

🏃 The Rundown: Last week London-based cloud-native issuer-processor Paymentology announced a $175 million growth investment co-led by Apis Partners (out of Apis Growth Fund III, the firm’s 16th payments investment) and Aspirity Partners (Aspirity’s first investment from its inaugural fund). The company operates across close to 70 countries and plans to use the capital to extend its issuer processing platform into credit, stablecoin, tokenisation, and AI-driven services. No post-money valuation was disclosed.

🥡 Takeaway: Issuer processing is one of those segments that doesn’t get the spotlight that BNPL or stablecoin neobanks do, but it sits underneath an enormous share of fintech cards in market. Every challenger bank, every embedded finance fintech, every crypto card programme has to plug into an issuer-processor somewhere, and historically the options have been a slow-moving Marqeta on one side and the legacy processors on the other.

Paymentology has carved out a real niche by being cloud-native and genuinely global from day one. What’s telling about this raise is where the capital is going. They’re not raising to extend into geography (they’re already global), they’re raising to push into adjacent product categories: credit, stablecoin issuance, tokenisation. That’s the right read of where issuer-processors need to go. The card itself is becoming a thinner wrapper around an underlying balance that could be fiat, credit, stablecoin, or some hybrid. Whoever owns the processing stack for that abstraction in five years is going to be very well positioned.

💰 Extraordinary Money (XMO) Raises $4M Pre-Seed To Build An AI-Native Consumer Finance Platform, Startup Daily

🏃 The Rundown: Last week Australian AI-native consumer finance startup Extraordinary Money (XMO) closed a $4 million pre-seed co-led by Airtree Ventures and Triple Bubble. The founding team is ex-Up Bank: Anson Parker (CPO), Sam Mendelsohn (payments lead), and Pete Johnson (CBO). XMO is building a predictive financial model that helps consumers anticipate future decisions rather than report on past ones, with agents handling the everyday cognitive load and staying clear of regulated advice.

🥡 Takeaway: The Up Bank team going again is the read here, and it’s a useful one. Up was the standout Australian neobank of the last cycle, defined less by its banking product than by the design and product instincts that made it feel like a different category. XMO is the same instincts pointed at the next platform shift, and Anson’s framing of “customers as not just the individuals, but their agents too” lines up neatly with where the consumer surface is moving.

The PFM era of static dashboards summarising what already happened is closing out, and what replaces it is a predictive, conversational layer where the data is plumbed in and the agent does the cognitive lift. If that idea sounds familiar, it’s the same self-driving money pitch Wealthfront co-founder and longtime CEO Andy Rachleff was making back in 2021, and Wealthfront had a working version of it shipping in 2020.

The challenge then wasn’t the tech, it was getting the consumer comfortable handing the wheel to software. XMO is betting that the AI-native era is what finally flips that. The harder problem from here is the segment itself. XMO has to navigate away from being read as another PFM app, deliver enough value that the agent earns its keep, and find a way to monetise. In Australia interchange is capped, which means the monetisation path almost inevitably leads to lending. It’ll be interesting to see how they navigate this.

🎧 How Kudos Built A Consumer Data Moat On Top Of Credit Card Rewards, Tearsheet (May 13, 2026)

Tikue Anazodo, co-founder and CEO of Kudos, joins Tearsheet to unpack how an AI-powered smart wallet that tells you which card to use at checkout has quietly built a meaningful consumer data moat on top of the rewards ecosystem. Worth a listen if you’re thinking about how the next generation of consumer fintechs build defensibility in a category where the underlying product is commoditised.

🎧 The Rise Of Sports Gambling, Fintech Takes (May 13, 2026)

Alex Johnson on the rise of sports gambling and the fintech rails that have made it scale. Worth a listen if you’re interested in how payments, wallets, and KYC infrastructure have become the quiet backbone of one of the most-talked-about (and despised) consumer categories around.

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🚀 Midday is now part of Ramp, Ramp

🏃 The Rundown: Last week Ramp announced it has acquired Midday, the open-source business management platform with 14,000+ GitHub stars covering time tracking, invoicing, and financial insights. Co-founders Pontus Abrahamsson and Viktor Hofte are joining Ramp.

🥡 Takeaway: This is Ramp’s second acquisition in roughly two months, after the Billhop deal in March that opened up the UK and European corridor. Billhop was about geography. Midday is about product surface, and read together they tell you where Ramp thinks the next leg of the company sits.

The most interesting thing here is what Ramp didn’t buy. Midday isn’t a payments company, an issuing stack, or a card program. It’s a small, design-led, AI-native finance and ops layer for SMBs with a community that genuinely cares about the craft (seriously, just look at their website). Ramp could have plugged any of the existing US time tracking or invoicing providers in here, most of them bigger. Picking Midday is a choice about what kind of product they want to ship next, not a gap they wanted to fill. Pontus’ work is also one of the better case studies in modern fintech UI on the open web, and that craft bar is worth as much as the customer base they’re absorbing.

The quiet read is on the AI side. Ramp’s engineering output is becoming the AI-native blueprint, bridging Ramp Labs and the self-maintaining software work (more on which in the podcast section), and adding a team that has been shipping AI-native finance operations for SMBs in public compounds that narrative. It goes to show that some of the most interesting plays in the M&A game are still hidden in plain sight.

📈 Robinhood’s venture fund IPO attracted 150,000+ retail investors, CEO says, TechCrunch

🏃 The Rundown: Last week Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said over 150,000 retail investors participated in the IPO of Robinhood Ventures Fund I, the publicly traded vehicle that gives any retail investor exposure to a basket of late-stage private companies including OpenAI, Stripe, Databricks, Oura, Mercor, Ramp, Airwallex and Boom. Tenev described it as “a publicly traded venture capital firm with daily liquidity. No accreditation requirements and no carry.”

🥡 Takeaway: What’s really going on here is Robinhood hunting for expansion paths next to the retail brokerage core. Prediction markets was the first one. Public-market access to private tech is the next, and the speed at which it’s followed the prediction markets launch tells you the company has decided product velocity in adjacent retail finance is the strategy.

AngelList shipped USVC two weeks earlier, with Naval personally chairing the investment committee, $500 minimum, no carry, and a portfolio that runs OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Sierra, Vercel, Crusoe and Legora. Two structurally similar products from two structurally different companies inside a fortnight tells you a bit about the category.

The reason it’s forming now is the supply side. The hot AI cohort (OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Databricks, xAI) has shown no real interest in going public, and the IPO pipeline has been one of the thinnest in a decade. Retail wants exposure to those names, the public market isn’t producing it, and the structures emerging to fill the gap are starting to look like real products. Expect Wealthsimple, SoFi, eToro and the European challengers to ship their own version in the coming months

🏦 PayPal Plans Job Cuts as Fintech’s New CEO Pursues Turnaround Strategy, Bloomberg

🏃 The Rundown: Last week PayPal said it will cut around 20% of its workforce (~4,760 jobs) over the next two to three years as part of a $1.5B savings program, announced alongside a Q1 profit drop. New CEO Enrique Lores, who took over from Alex Chriss on March 1 after seven years running HP Inc, said PayPal is “becoming a technology company again” and “aggressively adopting AI in our development processes.”

🥡 Takeaway: A 20% cut over 2-3 years is a long, slow restructuring rather than a single restructuring event, and the framing tells you something specific about where Lores thinks the gap is. He’s not pitching a strategic refocus, an asset sale, or a return-to-core narrative. The pitch is that PayPal stopped being an engineering-led company at some point and needs to become one again. That is a candid read, and the cuts are sized to fund the rebuild rather than to hit a quarter.

The bit most of the coverage missed is the comparison set. Stripe ships 288 products at Sessions. Adyen runs lean and absorbs Talon.One in its first acquisition in twenty years. Block flips half its workforce into AI-augmented roles. Ramp acquires Midday this same week. PayPal is the only one of the cohort that needs an explicit, multi-year turnaround program to get back into the conversation. Yes, the product surface is still huge (PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, Honey, Zettle), and the brand is still stronger than any of the post-2018 wave. But the development velocity has been the laggard for years, and Lores is now openly saying the inside of the company knows it.

The honest question is whether engineering-led turnarounds work at companies this size, in this industry, on this timeline. There are good precedents (Microsoft under Nadella, IBM under Gerstner) and there are very bad ones (Yahoo, the long parade of legacy tech companies that announced a software pivot and never recovered the multiple). The bigger problem is that the AI-native fintech cohort isn’t waiting. The two-to-three year window Lores is asking for is the same window in which Ramp, Stripe and the next tier of agent-native challengers will compound their lead. Buying time costs PayPal time it doesn’t have a lot of.

The one thing working in his favour is Venmo. It is still the rare consumer fintech brand in the US that hasn’t been outflanked by a challenger, and the Venmo growth profile has quietly held up while the rest of the company has wobbled. If the turnaround works, Venmo is the lead horse. If it doesn’t, Venmo is the asset that the next CEO eventually carves out and sells.

💼 Long Lake Agrees to Acquire Amex Global Business Travel for $6.3 Billion, Skift

🏃 The Rundown: Last week Long Lake Management agreed to acquire Amex GBT, the world’s largest corporate travel platform, for $6.3 billion in cash ($9.50 per share, a 60% premium to the prior close). The deal is backed by General Catalyst and Alpha Wave, and supported by voting agreements from Amex, Expedia, Qatar Investment Authority and BlackRock representing 69% of shares. Amex GBT will go private when the deal closes in H2.

🥡 Takeaway: I’d normally skip a corporate travel take-private, but the cap table on the buy side is what makes this an interesting story. General Catalyst has been openly building out their “Applied AI” thesis for the last 18 months: take a category that runs on legacy software, take it private, instrument it with AI end-to-end, and re-emerge with the cost structure of a software company and the scale of an incumbent. Corporate travel and expense is probably one of the most fertile single categories for that play. Every booking, every receipt, every reconciliation is exactly the workflow that agentic systems are now getting genuinely good at.

The fintech read sits at the intersection with the corporate card and spend stack. Amex GBT books the trip; an Amex Corporate, Brex, Ramp or Mercury etc card pays for it; an expense platform reconciles it. That four-step dance has stayed essentially unchanged for a decade. If Long Lake delivers on the thesis, the consolidated stack is one platform that handles the booking, the auth, the ledgering and the reconciliation with agents in the loop. That is a real adjacency to the spend management category and a meaningful headache for anyone whose moat sits on integrating with everyone.

The other thing worth noting is who isn’t in the deal. American Express is voting yes but isn’t taking GBT back in-house, despite the obvious vertical integration logic. The honest read is that running an AI-native rebuild of a legacy platform is a skill set Amex would rather rent than build. Letting General Catalyst and Long Lake do the heavy lifting, then taking a stake (or a partnership) in whatever comes out the other side, is a much cleaner play than running the transformation inside a regulated public company.

It’s a fascinating play, and it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out for General Catalyst.

🥀 Fintech startup Parker files for bankruptcy, TechCrunch

🏃 The Rundown: Last week Parker, the YC W19 e-commerce-focused corporate credit startup that came out of stealth in 2023 and raised more than $200 million in equity and debt (including a $125M lending facility), filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Assets and liabilities are each estimated between $50 million and $100 million. Industry reporting from Jason Mikula points to failed acquisition talks as the trigger.

🥡 Takeaway: Parker had a real product, real customers, and a real lending book. A YC-backed, Valar-led, $200M-raised SMB credit business with a card program and a $125M lending facility shutting down via Chapter 7 (rather than a wind-down with continuity for customers) is the kind of failure that only happens when the cap table can’t agree on a transaction and the underlying unit economics don’t survive standalone.

That’s the lesson worth taking away. Lending businesses dressed up as fintechs eventually have to clear lending unit economics. There is no AI-native, design-led or distribution shortcut around credit losses, capital cost, and concentration risk in a single vertical. The category is real, but the bar to clear is much higher than the deck suggests. Lending is, and probably always will be, the hardest game in fintech to win.

💰 Insurance startup Corgi hits $1.3B valuation 4 months after its Series A, TechCrunch

🏃 The Rundown: Last week YC-backed insurtech Corgi closed a $160M Series B led by TCV at a $1.3B valuation, just four months after its Series A. The company runs a full-stack AI-native insurance platform that consolidates underwriting, claims and policy admin, and is expanding from startup insurance into trucking and other verticals. Total raised is now around $268M.

🥡 Takeaway: Going from Series A to unicorn in four months is the kind of round shape that usually only shows up at the absolute top of a venture cycle. Corgi’s pitch isn’t really an insurance pitch. It’s a platform-rebuild pitch, with insurance as the wedge. Underwriting, claims and policy admin are the three workflows that have driven legacy P&C insurers into infrastructure debt for forty years, and rebuilding all three on an AI-native stack is the kind of category re-platforming the broader AI-native enterprise thesis has been waiting for.

Trucking is the deliberate next vertical: high claims volume, high fraud sensitivity, almost no modern software in the underwriting workflow. Clear trucking and the same platform probably clears marine, construction and mid-market commercial property. The thing to watch is the loss ratio in year two, because insurtechs raising at insurance-platform multiples while posting tech-platform marketing usually see that gap catch up around the second renewal cycle. Let's see how Corgi works that through.

💰 Fazeshift Raises $17M to Power the Future of Autonomous Finance, BusinessWire

🏃 The Rundown: Last week Fazeshift announced a $17M Series A led by F-Prime, with participation from Gradient Ventures, Y Combinator, Wayfinder Ventures, Pioneer Fund and Ritual Ventures. Fazeshift builds AI agents for accounts receivable, automating the busywork around invoicing, collections and cash application. Total raised now sits at $22M.

🥡 Takeaway: AR is another clean fit for an AI-native rebuild in B2B finance. The job is high-volume, rule-based, exception-heavy, and the cost of getting it slightly wrong is mostly time rather than capital. That maps almost perfectly onto what current-gen agents are good at, and explains why we’ve now seen a small cohort of AR-specialist plays raise inside a six-month window (Fazeshift, Modus from a few weeks back, plus a handful of European and Indian players).

The wedge for Fazeshift specifically is replacing the controller-and-AR-clerk loop with agents that drive the workflow end-to-end (invoice generation, dunning, customer email, cash application, dispute triage), with the human only stepping in on genuine exceptions. If the productivity numbers hold, this is the kind of product where mid-market finance teams quietly cut headcount in the second half of the year and the savings show up directly in operating margin.

The category question is whether AR ends up as a feature inside the broader spend platforms (Ramp, Brex, Mercury, NetSuite) or stays a standalone layer. Only time will tell.

🎧 How Ramp Built Self-Maintaining Software, Data Driven NYC (May 2026)

Alex Levinson from Ramp Labs walks through how they built an agentic system that monitors production, triages alerts, and proposes fixes without human intervention, in the context of Ramp’s broader bet on AI-native engineering. A useful companion piece to the Midday acquisition above if you want to understand why the AI craft inside Ramp has become a real competitive moat. Add this one to your playlist.

🎧 Stablecoin infrastructure is rewiring cross-border payments, Tearsheet (May 5)

Avinash Chidambaram, founder and CEO of Cybrid, sits down with Tearsheet to walk through how the cross-border payments stack is being rebuilt around stablecoin rails — what’s actually shipping in production, where the rails still break, and the integration work the incumbents are doing quietly behind the scenes. Practical view from someone in the trenches rather than the usual narrative pitch. Well worth a listen.

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I Love It! ◌ I Like It ◌ Not Bad ◌ I Don’t Like It ◌ It’s Awful

If you’re new, here is a breakdown of what you can expect from each issue.

If you missed our recent editions, you can catch up here. Some previous issues you might want to check out if you’re new include “A Deep Dive Into The Cash App's Growth Machine”, “The Future Of Payment Initiation”, and “Current: Doing It Differently”.

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🚀 Everything we announced at Sessions 2026, Stripe

🏃 The Rundown: Stripe held its annual Sessions conference last week and used the stage to ship 288 product launches, headlined by the Machine Payments Protocol (a co-authored standard with Tempo for agent-to-business transactions), agent-ready Link wallets across 250M consumers, stablecoin acceptance across 32 new markets, and stablecoin-backed cards in 30 countries. Patrick and John Collison framed the surface-area expansion around one thesis: agent commerce is no longer a slide-deck story.

🥡 Takeaway: 288 launches in a single keynote is a lot, even by Stripe’s standards. The breadth is the message — every product surface they own moved in the same direction in the same week, and the through-line is one clear bet on what comes next. The keystone is the Machine Payments Protocol.

Card rails were built for a world where the buyer was a person who could pause, read, click, type a CVV, and tolerate a 3-second redirect. None of that is true when the buyer is software. MPP is Stripe’s attempt to define what an agent-native checkout actually looks like at the protocol layer, with Tempo, Stripe’s own high-throughput chain, doing the settlement work underneath at machine-rate. Shipping both the protocol and the chain it runs on, in the same week, tells you how committed Stripe is to owning this stack end-to-end.

The agent-payments-plus-stablecoins combo is the part most worth sitting with. Either bet on its own would have been the headline at any other Sessions. Together they say something more specific: Stripe doesn’t think you can build an agent commerce stack on legacy card rails alone. Stablecoins are the throughput and settlement layer agents actually need, and Tempo is Stripe’s bet on owning the chain that runs underneath. You don’t ship MPP, agent-ready Link, stablecoin acceptance in 32 new markets, and stablecoin-backed cards in 30 countries in the same week unless you genuinely think the buyer is changing.

The other thread that deserves more attention is Stripe Treasury, and it’s a completely separate move from the agent commerce story. For the better part of a decade, Stripe has been the easiest way for a business to accept money on the internet, then watched those funds bounce straight out into a Chase or BofA or Wells account where the actual primary banking relationship lives. Every payout, every payroll run, every supplier transfer has been Stripe handing off the customer to someone else. That’s a lot of money to be the highway for and never hold. Treasury, the new Stripe card with Mastercard cashback, instant free transfers between Stripe businesses, and the move to support 15 currencies are all the same play. Stripe finally going after the part of the relationship it’s been giving away. Honestly, it’s about time. The unit economics of being the place where businesses actually keep their money are a different game from being the rail money briefly passes through, and Stripe has had every other ingredient (distribution, brand, developer trust) for years.

📈 SoFi Q1 2026 earnings: record revenue, profit doubles, Yahoo Finance / Reuters

🏃 The Rundown: SoFi reported Q1 last week with record adjusted net revenue of $1.1B (up 41% YoY) and net income more than doubling to $166.7M. Galileo platform revenue, however, fell 27% to $75.1M as Chime fully transitioned off SoFi’s processing stack. The stock dropped 13% on the print.

🥡 Takeaway: The Galileo number is the story, and I don’t think it’s getting the attention it deserves. SoFi has historically pitched a tidy two-engine narrative to investors: a fast-growing direct consumer fintech and a high-margin BaaS business that powers other people’s apps. Chime fully exiting the platform tests whether the BaaS engine survives its biggest customer leaving the building.

This is the structural problem with BaaS that nobody at the layer wants to say out loud. When your customer is small, paying you to run their card-issuing, ledgering, and processing makes total sense. When your customer is big enough to have an IPO, an engineering org, and a balance sheet, paying for that stack looks like a tax. The trickier bit is that the in-house option is no longer a multi-year project. With the OCC turning fintech charter applications around in 120 days and the current US administration genuinely receptive to non-bank applicants, taking your banking destiny into your own hands has become a real path on a 12-to-18 month horizon. Nearly twenty fintechs and digital-asset firms have applied for OCC charters in 2026 alone, with Mission Lane the most recent. The end state of that trend is more Chimes, not fewer.

For SoFi specifically, the job now is to rebuild Galileo around customers who can’t follow the same exit playbook. Earlier-stage fintechs, smaller programs, use cases where in-housing the rails genuinely doesn’t make sense. That is a viable business but a structurally smaller one than the one Galileo was scaled for, and the BaaS multiple should probably reflect that.

🤖 Merchants losing revenue as fraud systems misclassify AI shopping agents as malicious bots, Finextra

🏃 The Rundown: Chargebacks911 published research last week showing merchant fraud systems are increasingly misclassifying legitimate AI shopping agents as malicious bots, blocking authorised purchases at scale before they can complete. With Visa and Mastercard already piloting agent-initiated transactions and Perplexity, Walmart, and Amazon enabling agents to transact on consumers’ behalf, the rejection problem is growing fast and is currently invisible because false declines do not show up in chargeback metrics.

🥡 Takeaway: The agent commerce conversation has lived almost entirely on the rails side over the last twelve months. How agents check out, what protocol they use, what chain settles the transaction. The piece almost nobody is talking about is what happens once the transaction hits the merchant’s fraud stack.

Fraud systems were built around one assumption: there is a human on the other end, with a device fingerprint, a typing cadence, an IP that resolves to where they actually live. Strip the human and replace them with a browser-resident agent and almost every signal either disappears or starts to look identical to the bot patterns the same systems are designed to block. The result is a quiet wave of false declines that, unlike chargebacks, never surface on the merchant’s P&L. The lost revenue just doesn’t appear.

The fraud stack is just the leading indicator though. KYC, dispute handling, customer support, refund policies. All of it was written for a world where the counterparty has a heartbeat. The companies that go through their own stack and rewrite the human-only assumptions out are going to win the next decade. The ones that don’t are going to be very confused about why their conversion is dropping in 18 months.

🏠 NatWest embeds home-buying options on ChatGPT, Finextra

🏃 The Rundown: Last week NatWest became the first UK bank to ship an app inside the ChatGPT app store, offering home-buying and re-mortgage guidance with affordability calculations and indicative rates pulled from public NatWest APIs. The launch builds on an OpenAI partnership running since March 2025.

🥡 Takeaway: What NatWest actually shipped is not groundbreaking. A borrowing calculator, an affordability stress-test, and some indicative mortgage rates pulled from a public API. The same functionality lives on every comparison site in the country, and on the NatWest website itself. As a piece of product, it’s table stakes wrapped in a ChatGPT skin.

What is genuinely new is the channel. ChatGPT is the top-of-funnel for a generation of customers who would otherwise have started at a comparison site or a broker, and being inside the prompt where someone asks “how much can I borrow on £75k” is an acquisition surface that didn’t exist before. No paid search bid, no affiliate fee, no broker commission. This is the channel everyone in financial services is going to chase over the next 24 months. Credit cards, current accounts, personal loans, savings, insurance, wealth — same dynamic across all of them.

The genuinely funny part is that NatWest got there first. If you’d asked me twelve months ago which UK institution would ship the first ChatGPT app, I would not have picked the 300-year-old former RBS. The challenger banks have spent the last decade telling everyone they are the AI-native, mobile-first, customer-obsessed future of banking. Monzo, Starling, Revolut. None of them shipped first. A high-street incumbent did, on the back of an OpenAI partnership running quietly since March 2025. The challengers are going to chase, but they’re chasing rather than leading, and the “we move faster than the legacy banks” narrative just got harder to defend.

💰 Blackbird leads $14 million Seed round for the ‘Canva of financial advice’, Startup Daily

🏃 The Rundown: Australian AI fintech Marloo closed a A$14M (US$10M) seed round last week led by existing investor Blackbird Ventures. Founders Hardy Michel, Shakeel Lala, and Ben Robertson are building an AI partner for financial advisers that automates notes, documentation, and compliance work. Total raised in less than a year now sits north of A$18M.

🥡 Takeaway: This is a “where the puck is going” round in a category that has historically been very hard to crack. Financial advice software has been dominated by stodgy planning suites and CRM-with-a-finance-skin tools for two decades, and every wave of disruption has bounced off the regulatory edges of the category. Marloo is approaching it from the opposite direction: instead of replacing the adviser, give them an AI that absorbs the busywork the regulators care about most (notes, docs, compliance trails) so they can spend their time on the part that actually generates fees.

650 firms across six countries in six months, with 42% monthly revenue growth, is the kind of distribution velocity that tells you advisers are pulling this in rather than being sold to. That is usually the strongest signal in vertical SaaS. The next test is whether the product can hold up as it moves from note-taking partner to genuinely operational layer (statement of advice generation, file reviews, ongoing-service obligations). That is where the real moat sits, and that is also where the regulatory complexity scales fastest.

If they can get there, this is one of the more interesting AI-vertical plays out of Australia in this cycle.

💰 Credit lifecycle platform Oolka raises $14 Mn in Series A led by Accel, Entrackr

🏃 The Rundown: Oolka, an India-based credit-lifecycle platform, raised $14M in a Series A led by Accel last week, with participation from Lightspeed and Z47 (Matrix Partners India), plus angel investment from Meesho’s co-founders. Capital will go toward growing engineering and shipping AI tooling that helps Indian consumers improve credit scores and access loans at better rates.

🥡 Takeaway: India’s credit-rails problem has always been less about the underwriting and more about the data plumbing on the consumer side. CIBIL, Experian, CRIF and Equifax India all run, but consumer literacy and tooling have lagged the credit-score infrastructure by a decade. Oolka is going at the user side of that gap, with AI doing the heavy lifting between “here is your score” and “here is what you can actually do about it next.”

The real question is whether Oolka can convert score-coaching into loan placement at scale. If they can, the unit economics look more like a marketplace than a consumer SaaS, which is the version of this business that is actually big.

🎧 How Stripe Is Building For An Agent-Native World, AI & I (Apr 29)

Dan Shipper sits down with Emily Glassberg Sands, Stripe’s Head of Data & AI, to dig into the data behind agent commerce: how AI companies are scaling 3x faster than the top SaaS cohort of 2018, how fraud is moving from checkout to the full funnel, and how Stripe is rebuilding payments infrastructure for a world where the buyer is software. A fantastic companion piece to the Sessions news above. Add this one to your playlist.

🎧 Western Union's Stablecoin Moment, This Week in Fintech / Crossing the Chasm series (Apr 29)

Chiara Munaretto sits down with Malcolm Clarke to unpack how Western Union is bringing stablecoins into production with USDPT: why they picked Solana, why this is internal-rails-first not consumer-first, and what the Stable Card has to clear before it actually ships. Well worth a listen if you want a clearer picture of how an incumbent thinks about stablecoin adoption from the inside.

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If you missed our recent editions, you can catch up here. Some previous issues you might want to check out if you’re new include “A Deep Dive Into The Cash App's Growth Machine”, “The Future Of Payment Initiation”, and “Current: Doing It Differently”.

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💳 Adyen Buys Talon.One For €750M In Its First-Ever Acquisition, Adyen

🏃 The Rundown: Adyen announced last week that it has agreed to acquire Berlin-based loyalty and incentives platform Talon.One for €750M ($878M), funded entirely from existing cash. Talon.One serves 300+ global merchants including Adidas, Sephora, and Panera Bread, and is set to book around €60M in ARR by year-end with 30-40% annual growth. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026.

🥡 Takeaway: This is a big bet, however you want to slice it. €750M from existing cash, the first acquisition in Adyen’s twenty-year history, and a co-founder team that is reinvesting a meaningful portion of their proceeds back into Adyen stock. None of those signals are accidental. Adyen has been famously disciplined about building rather than buying for two decades, and they have just chosen to break that discipline for the first time. That tells you something about how strongly the leadership feels this fits the long-term roadmap.

The framing from co-CEO Ingo Uytdehaage is the bit worth sitting with. The pitch isn’t loyalty as a bolt-on. It’s loyalty as something that fires before the payment completes. Recognise the shopper, decide which offer or incentive to surface, and let that influence what gets bought and at what margin. Payments stop being the moment of conversion and start being the moment of optimisation.

The widening of the surface area for both Adyen and Stripe has been quietly going on for a long time. Stripe has been adding adjacencies for years (Atlas, Treasury, Capital, Tax, Issuing, Bridge, Privy, Tempo, the list keeps growing). Adyen has built out unified commerce, in-store, embedded financial products, and platform tooling for marketplaces along its own vector. The “payments company” label has been doing less and less work for either of them for some time. The Talon.One deal is the first time Adyen has been willing to do that surface expansion via acquisition rather than building it themselves, and that shift in posture is arguably the bigger signal than the loyalty product itself.

And honestly, it’s a useful reminder that not every big deal in 2026 needs to be an AI story. Sometimes the through-line is just two long-run platform strategies finally crossing paths.

⚖️ New York Sues Coinbase And Gemini Over Prediction Markets, NY Office of the Attorney General

🏃 The Rundown: New York Attorney General Letitia James filed lawsuits last week against Coinbase Financial Markets and Gemini Titan in Manhattan state court, alleging that their prediction market platforms are unlicensed gambling operations. The state is seeking forfeiture of profits, civil fines equal to three times those profits, and restitution. Reported damages claims sit at around $2.2B for Coinbase and $1.2B for Gemini. Coinbase’s Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal pushed back, arguing prediction markets are federally regulated by the CFTC.

🥡 Takeaway: The setup here is straightforward. NY’s argument is that event contracts on sports, elections, and entertainment outcomes are wagers on things outside the user’s control, which under state law is gambling. Coinbase and Gemini’s argument is that these are commodity derivatives, federally regulated by the CFTC, and state gambling law shouldn’t apply. Kalshi has been litigating the same question against the NY Gaming Commission since October, and Nevada and Washington have brought their own actions. I genuinely don’t know where this one lands, but it’ll be somewhere higher up than a Manhattan court.

The bit that I keep coming back to is how everyone seems to want a piece of prediction markets despite the regulatory mess sitting underneath them. Kalshi pioneered the CFTC-registered model, then Coinbase launched a product in January, Gemini in December, and there’s a queue of others lining up behind them. That’s a lot of companies looking at the same minefield and deciding the fight is worth fighting. Which tells you something about what they all think the category is worth if it does end up settled in the operators’ favour. Either way, this is one of the more consequential regulatory fights in fintech right now and honestly it’s sort of sad.

👶 Cash App Is Targeting A New Kind Of Customer: 6- To 12-Year-Olds, TechCrunch

🏃 The Rundown: Cash App rolled out managed accounts for kids aged 6-12 last week. Parents control the account from their own Cash App, kids get a custom Cash App Visa debit card and can earn up to 3.25% APY on savings, and money can be received from up to five parent-approved trusted contacts. Accounts are FDIC pass-through eligible via partner banks and convert to “sponsored” teen accounts at 13. Cash App already serves more than 5 million teens monthly.

🥡 Takeaway: Strip away the financial literacy framing and what’s actually happening is that Cash App is extending its onboarding funnel by seven years. Get the user at six, run them through a managed account, graduate them to a teen account at 13, then a fully featured adult account at 18 with crypto, brokerage, and lending baked in. Greenlight, Step, Apple Cash Family and others have been chipping at this for years, but none of them have Cash App’s installed base of US parents or that clean conversion path running all the way through.

The 3.25% APY on kids’ savings is the bit that should make traditional consumer banks uncomfortable. It’s meaningfully better than what most US challengers offer adults, let alone what high street banks pay on a kids’ savings account. The framing is that kids learn about savings goals. The actual mechanism is Cash App paying real money to keep the family’s deposits in its ecosystem rather than at Wells Fargo or Chase. Half of Cash App parents already manage money for their kids on the platform (which is a great starting point for the product) anyway, so the product is really a wedge into the parent’s primary-account behaviour as much as it is about the kid.

📱 Visa And TikTok Roll Out Creator Card For UK Content Creators, The Paypers

🏃 The Rundown: Visa and TikTok announced last week the rollout of a co-branded Creator Card for UK-based content creators, designed to handle creator earnings, business expenses, and faster payouts. It follows their TikTok Debit Card for social commerce payouts launched the prior week, and is the latest in a string of card programmes Visa is running with platforms that have large creator and seller bases.

🥡 Takeaway: The bit I keep coming back to is how much interest the business banking space is still pulling in, and increasingly from platform players coming at it from a totally different angle to the usual fintech challengers.

The logic on a TikTok move like this isn’t that complicated. They already sit at the source of a real chunk of UK creator income (brand deals, Shop revenue, Live gifts, ad share), and the natural next step from “we paid you” is “we hold the money for you too”. If they can get the payouts, spend, and a bit of the tax mess sitting in the same place, the switching cost on the creator goes up materially. From there you’ve got a wedge into a customer profile that looks a lot like an SMB, just dressed differently.

The thing is, this is well-trodden ground and not all of it has gone well. Uber had a real crack at it with Uber Money. The product never really got to escape velocity and a lot of it quietly got rolled back. Karat is the closer analogue — they’ve been building a banking product specifically for creators for a few years now, with underwriting that actually understands platform income. They’ve made decent progress but it’s been slower going than the early excitement suggested, and they don’t have the platform integration TikTok would.

TikTok does have one structural edge worth noting. A creator’s audience, content, and brand all live on the platform, so the income is platform-dependent in a way an Uber driver’s earnings never were. A driver can switch to Lyft tomorrow and keep earning. A creator can’t move their followers without taking a real revenue hit or investing substantial dollars. Whether that’s enough to make this stick is a different question, and honestly I’m not sure this lands any better than the Uber experiment did.

💰 Salmon Raises $100M In Equity And Debt To Bring Digital Credit To Underbanked Filipinos, TechCrunch

🏃 The Rundown: Manila-based digital lending fintech Salmon closed $100M in combined equity and debt financing last week, supporting its next phase of growth across the Philippines.

🥡 Takeaway: The Philippines is one of the more interesting digital lending markets in Asia and one that doesn’t get nearly enough airtime in fintech coverage. The fundamentals are all there — a large unbanked population, smartphone penetration well ahead of formal banking infrastructure, and a Gen Z-heavy demographic that has very little reason to start its financial life with a traditional bank.

The bit I keep coming back to is that the chartered digital banks (Tonik, Maya, GoTyme and the rest) have been in collective loss territory for years, mostly because thin-file lending in the Philippines is genuinely hard. Salmon is on the non-bank side of that fence, which lets them move faster but means they live or die on the loan book performing. A $100M raise at this stage suggests something is working.

💰 Latitude Raises $8M Seed To Build Stablecoin-To-Fiat Payments Infrastructure, FinTech Futures

🏃 The Rundown: Cross-border payments startup Latitude emerged from stealth last week with $8M in seed funding led by NEA, with participation from Lightspeed Faction, Coinbase Ventures, Paxos, Bitso, and the Solana Foundation. Founded by ex-Stripe, Coinbase, and Uber operators, Latitude offers a stablecoin-to-local-fiat payments network covering 50+ markets at a flat 0.5% fee.

🥡 Takeaway: The bit that stands out here isn’t the round size, it’s the team. CEO Cyril Mathew did international driver and payment partnerships at Uber, then led USDC growth at Coinbase, then ran the launch of stablecoin-based creator payouts to 100+ countries at Stripe. That is genuinely the right CV for this product, and it shows in the early signals. The team has already pulled together 38 state money transmitter licences and Zencastr is already running creator payouts through them.

The honest read though is that this is a deeply crowded space. Bridge (now inside Stripe), BVNK (now being acquired by Mastercard), Conduit, Zerohash, Rain, Ironlight, and the rest. Every layer of the stablecoin payments stack already has venture-backed incumbents and most of them are not seed-stage anymore. The flat 0.5% pricing at interbank is sharp, the founder-market fit is real, and investors clearly see a wedge. It’ll be genuinely interesting to see how Latitude tries to crack a market where almost everyone bigger is already swinging at the same problem.

🎧 Facing Credit: The Credit Score After FICO, Fintech Takes (April 22, 2026)

Alex Johnson sits down with Rich Franks (20+ years in credit risk across both the bank and fintech sides) to dig into why the credit scoring market has shifted more in the last few years than it has in the previous two decades. The bit on what comes after FICO and how lenders are actually using alternative data is the most useful take I’ve heard on this in a while. Add this one to your playlist.

🎧 How Block Built A $200 Billion Credit Operation By Seeing Customers Traditional Lenders Can’t, Tearsheet (April 22, 2026)

A great deep-dive on how Block has used its closed-loop view of seller and consumer cashflow to build a $200B credit operation that traditional underwriters can’t replicate. The framing on data advantages translating into a real lending moat is the most interesting part. Well worth a listen.

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📧 Feel free to reach out if you want to connect. I'm @alantsen on Twitter, or you can D.M. me directly by clicking the button below ↴

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🙏 What did you think of this week's issue of FR?

I Love It! ◌ I Like It ◌ Not Bad ◌ I Don’t Like It ◌ It’s Awful

If you’re new, here is a breakdown of what you can expect from each issue.

If you missed our recent editions, you can catch up here. Some previous issues you might want to check out if you’re new include “A Deep Dive Into The Cash App's Growth Machine”, “The Future Of Payment Initiation”, and “Current: Doing It Differently”.

Your ad could be HERE!

Fintech Radar is a must-read for fintech founders, operators, and investors. If that’s your target audience, placing an ad right HERE is a cost-effective way to reach them.

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🚀 OpenAI Acquires AI Personal Finance Startup Hiro, TechCrunch

🏃 The Rundown: OpenAI announced last week that it has acquired Hiro, an AI-powered personal finance app founded by Digit’s Ethan Bloch. Terms were not disclosed. The Hiro app shuts down on April 20, with user data wiped by May 13. The team (about 10 people) is joining OpenAI. This is OpenAI’s second fintech acqui-hire, following Roi in October.

🥡 Takeaway: On the back of last week’s Perplexity x Plaid tie-up, this is another data point in the same direction. OpenAI is clearly thinking harder about personal finance, and pulling in a team that’s already worked out how to get an LLM to do financial maths reliably tells you it’s on the roadmap.

Hiro wasn’t big. They raised from Ribbit, General Catalyst and Restive, never disclosed the total, and the app is getting switched off in two weeks. This is a brain trust acquisition, not a user base one. Bloch has been through the consumer fintech cycle before with Digit, and the Hiro team spent eighteen months on the unsexy but critical problem of making model output auditable when the answer involves your money.

The bigger read is about the shape of the PFM category itself. As noted last week, the old playbook required you to build the dashboards, the categorisation engine, the rules, the notifications, before a user ever saw any value. Plug the data in, ask the model a question, get an answer that models a what-if scenario with the maths showing its working. That’s a radically different product shape to Mint circa 2010, and it’s being built inside the chat interface the user already lives in.

Gone are the days of the standalone PFM app. In 2026, it turns out it’s just a skills.md file. The dashboard, the categorisation, the goal-setting UI, all of it collapses into a prompt and a bank data feed. What Hiro’s team and the Perplexity x Plaid piece are both pointing at is the same destination, and that is a very different competitive landscape for anyone still building PFM as a standalone product. RIP the PFM app category.

💳 American Express Debuts ACE Developer Kit For Agentic Commerce, American Express

🏃 The Rundown: Amex launched its Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE) Developer Kit last week, along with Amex Agent Purchase Protection, a commitment to cover cardmember purchases made by registered AI agents when something goes wrong. The kit has five components including agent registration, account enablement, intent intelligence, payment credentials and cart context. Amex says it is already working with ChatGPT and building for Claude and other agents.

🥡 Takeaway: To understand why every scheme (open or closed loop) is sprinting at agentic payments, look at the rest of the business. Cardholder growth is slowing. Spend per human has a ceiling. Cross-border growth has been decelerating three years running. The organic engine that made the card networks infinite compounders is plateauing, and when the human side taps out, the network has to move up the stack. Agentic commerce is that stack.

A tokenised credential sitting inside an agent runtime that authorises and settles in milliseconds is a completely different business to clipping swipe fees on human spend. What’s missing isn’t the tokenisation infrastructure (Visa and Mastercard are already well down that path), it’s the developer surface and the trust layer that makes agents willing to pull the trigger. That’s exactly what ACE is.

Visa and Mastercard have both published agentic commerce principles this year (remember the Mastercard x Ericsson piece from Issue #148), but neither has shipped a developer kit that maps the full commerce lifecycle. The closed-loop network does a lot of work here. Amex is the issuer, the network and the acquirer, which means it can make guarantees the open-loop networks would need to negotiate with their issuing banks to match.

Agent Purchase Protection is the part I find most interesting. For agentic commerce to scale, someone has to take the liability when an agent books the wrong hotel or buys the wrong SKU. Amex saying “we will cover the cardmember if the agent screws up” is the trust primitive that is really compelling. Merchants get the flip side too, with fewer disputes landing at their door because Amex can see the authenticated intent.

Command line commerce is coming, and the prize is the next big opportunity for the schemes (and many others too!). The ACE kit is Amex planting a flag.

💳 Once Close Enough For An Acquisition, Stripe And Airwallex Are Now Going After Each Other, TechCrunch

🏃 The Rundown: Airwallex is pushing into Stripe’s US home market with a new point-of-sale product that lets merchants accept in-person payments across multiple countries through a single platform. The two companies almost did a $1.2B acquisition deal back in 2019 when Airwallex had $2M in revenue. Today Airwallex claims $1.3B in annualised revenue, growing at 85% year-over-year, with close to 90 financial licenses across 50 markets.

🥡 Takeaway: Stripe has cast a long shadow over the payments industry over the last decade, and the story in 2026 is that the shadow finally has real competitors. Not just Airwallex. Adyen is still pushing. Rapyd, dLocal, Nuvei and a growing list of regional players are all chipping at different edges of the Stripe footprint.

The point that usually gets glossed over in fintech coverage is that the moat in payments isn’t the API. It’s the regulatory stack underneath, and this is the actual game. You start out renting access to the pipes through local partners, and over time you earn the licenses and direct integrations that give you direct access rather than intermediated access. Airwallex has quietly spent a decade grinding on exactly that. Seven years to get the Japan license that lets it hold funds inside the country instead of repatriating them. Acquisitions in emerging markets to pick up licenses that central banks no longer issue. As Zhang put it to TechCrunch, “you can’t really vibe-code an integration with Mexico’s central bank.” That kind of work is boring, expensive and impossible to replicate quickly, which is exactly why it’s valuable.

The in-person POS product is the natural extension of that stack. If you already have direct access to the rails in 50 markets, adding a terminal is a feature, not a new business. Stripe Terminal is US-heavy. Adyen is enterprise-heavy. Airwallex is going after the gap in the middle (more where Square plays), which is the growing set of mid-market multinationals that want one vendor instead of a different one per country.

The broader read is this. It has never been easier to ship software. Vibe coding, LLMs and modern infra mean the surface-level product work that used to take a team a year can now happen in a weekend. The magic has shifted to the hard things, the things you can’t automate your way through. Licensing is the epitome of that. Dealing with central banks and regulators, years of compliance work, capital reserves, audit trails. You cannot prompt your way into any of it, and the companies that have spent a decade doing the unsexy grind are the ones that end up with the most defensible businesses on the other side.

📈 X And Wealthsimple Launch One-Tap Stock Trading In Canada, Bitcoin.com News

🏃 The Rundown: X rolled out interactive Cashtags last week for iPhone users in the US and Canada. Tap a ticker or contract address and you get real-time price data, charts and related posts inside the app. In Canada, X also launched a pilot with Wealthsimple that puts a trade button on each Cashtag page, routing users directly into the brokerage to execute the order. X is not the broker. Web, Android and international expansion are coming soon.

🥡 Takeaway: I wrote about the Smart Cashtags idea when it first surfaced in Issue #148, back when X Money was the shiny object. The bit that interested me then, and interests me more now, is the distribution angle. Finance conversations already happen on X every day. The leap from “I’m reading about TSLA” to “I’m buying TSLA” used to require three apps and a tab switch. X has collapsed that to one tap, with Wealthsimple handling execution in Canada to start.

Canada has a tightly regulated brokerage market with incumbents (RBC, TD, BMO) that tend to move slowly, and Wealthsimple has been steadily picking up share in self-directed investing for years. For Wealthsimple, having a distribution channel that sits inside the default financial feed for millions of Canadians is a meaningful growth lever. For X, integrating with a challenger rather than an incumbent is consistent with its product ethos and probably easier to ship quickly.

Who plays the Wealthsimple role in the US, UK, Australia, and so on is an open question, but the answer matters a lot. Whoever lands those partnerships ends up with a distribution channel that would otherwise take years of performance marketing to build. Or maybe we see them actually do the execution lift through a partner like Drivewealth in other markets. Only time will tell.

What I keep coming back to is that X isn’t manufacturing a new behaviour here. They are starting with something that already happens on the platform. People talk about stocks and crypto on X constantly, and Cashtags just reduces the friction between talking about an asset and acting on it. That’s a very different product instinct to X Money, which is trying to seed a behaviour. Start with what people already do, make it one tap easier, and the adoption curve usually looks after itself.

🏦 Revolut Business Launches GlobalHire Employer Of Record, National Technology News

🏃 The Rundown: Revolut Business launched GlobalHire last week, an Employer of Record service that lets UK businesses hire and pay international staff across 160 countries without setting up local entities. The platform moves candidates from contract to onboarded in two to five days, uses Revolut’s FX stack to pay salaries at interbank rates, and automates payroll, tax and compliance. It sits directly inside the Revolut Business dashboard.

🥡 Takeaway: Read on its own, GlobalHire looks like another feature launch. Read in context, it’s a pretty clear signal that Revolut is positioning itself as the operating system for global SMBs (my “wallets to workflows” thesis), and that they are willing to step well outside the banking stack to get there. This is a direct shot at Deel, Remote and Rippling, not at another neobank.

The bit that is most interesting to me is where the economics come from. Traditional EOR providers charge up to 5% in currency mark-ups on salary payments, because most of them lean on localised banking partners in each country and clip margin along the way. Revolut already has the FX stack and the multi-currency infrastructure, which means they can pay at interbank rates across a variety of markets and still make the unit economics work. The core revenue driver on this product sits squarely in Revolut’s wheelhouse, and that is a structural advantage the incumbent EOR players don’t have.

The broader point is simple. This isn’t Revolut trying to bolt on a workforce product. It’s another piece of the SMB operating system they have been quietly building for years, sitting alongside business banking, expense cards, payroll, international payments and now hiring. Each product individually is a me-too. Stacked together on the same underlying FX and banking rails, it starts to look like a genuinely differentiated bundle.

💰 HockeyStack Raises $50M+ For Enterprise Revenue Agents, HockeyStack / PR Newswire

🏃 The Rundown: HockeyStack announced last week that its total funding has crossed $50M, with a new round backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Y Combinator and Uncorrelated Ventures. Alongside the raise, the company launched Revenue Agents for the Enterprise, an AI-driven platform for prospecting, new business and account expansion.

🥡 Takeaway: HockeyStack isn’t strictly a fintech, but I’m including it because the pattern is one every fintech operator should be paying attention to.

Enterprise SaaS is rapidly being reshaped by agentic products that don’t just analyse data, they execute on it. Revenue Agents are pitched as outperforming humans on prospecting and pipeline management. Whether that’s true yet is almost beside the point. The category is real and moving fast.

For anyone building in B2B fintech, the read-across is obvious. The same agent architecture that is coming for sales operations is coming for treasury, AR, AP, collections and risk. Modus (Issue #154) already showed what that looks like in accounting. The interesting question is who owns the orchestration layer. Platforms like HockeyStack are trying to be the system of record that agents plug into. The winners in fintech will need to figure out if they are that system or just a node inside someone else’s.

💰 Slash Financial Hits Unicorn Status With $100M Series C, FinTech Global

🏃 The Rundown: Slash Financial, a San Francisco business banking platform, raised a $100M Series C at a $1.4B valuation last week. Ribbit Capital led the round, with Khosla Ventures coming in as a new investor and Goodwater Capital (which led the Series B 16 months ago) co-leading. NEA and Y Combinator participated for the fourth consecutive time.

🥡 Takeaway: Business banking is still the gold rush of fintech, and Slash getting to unicorn status at this pace is another data point. Ramp, Brex and Mercury proved the SMB demand. The next wave of entrants (Rho, Meow and others) are carving out niches within that demand, whether that’s agent-native workflows, vertical SaaS, or specific customer segments.

What’s interesting about Slash is how narrow the wedge is. They started out serving a very specific set of operators (e-commerce resellers, media buyers, agencies) that needed fast card issuance and instant virtual cards to run ad spend. A sliver of a sliver of the SMB market. From that wedge they’ve built up into a more general business banking product, and the unicorn round says the land and expand is working. Worth tracking how much of their revenue comes from those original sharp-edged use cases versus the broader SMB base 16 months from now.

🎧 Max Levchin: “The Net IQ Of The World Is About To Go Up 50 Points”, Sourcery (April 13, 2026)

I’ve run a fair few Max Levchin interviews in FR over the years, but this one got me because he really digs into how AI is reshaping the dev stack and the way companies actually get built. If you want a grounded founder take on what collapsing build costs mean for new company formation and the competitive set, add this one to your playlist.

🎧 Consumer Banking Is Back In Focus And Looks Nothing Like 2019, Tearsheet (April 13, 2026)

Zack Miller takes a crack at why consumer banking is interesting again, and why the 2026 version looks nothing like the 2019 neobank boom. A good grounding on where the puck is going if you’re building or investing in the space. Well worth a listen.

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🤖 Meow Technologies Launches Banking for AI Agents, BusinessWire

🏃 The Rundown: San Francisco-based Meow Technologies launched what it’s calling the first agentic banking platform. AI agents can now open business checking accounts, issue corporate cards, send and receive payments, and manage invoicing autonomously. The platform integrates with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and Gemini via an MCP endpoint at meow.com/mcp.

🥡 Takeaway: We’ve spent the past year talking about AI agents handling customer service tickets and writing code. Meow is asking a different question: what happens when the agent needs a bank account?

If you’re building an AI agent that manages procurement for a small business, it currently hits a wall the moment it needs to actually pay for something. Meow’s pitch is removing that wall entirely. One natural language prompt, and the agent opens an account, gets a card, and starts transacting. If you’ve been following my agentic payments thesis this year, this is the back end to it. Banking infrastructure that agents can interface with in their own language, natively.

The MCP integration is the detail worth paying attention to. By exposing a Model Context Protocol endpoint, Meow is positioning itself as infrastructure for the agent economy. They’re not building for one AI provider, they’re building for the ecosystem of agents that will need to move money.

The company has raised about $30 million from Tiger Global, QED, Lux Capital, and Coinbase Ventures. It’s still early, and they got there early. But the real question isn’t whether the tech works. It’s whether customers outside the bleeding edge, the ones who aren’t deploying their own OpenClaw instance, are ready to let an AI agent open a bank account on their behalf. That’s still a chasm to cross. But if this is the year the foundations are laid for the agent economy, companies like Meow are laying some of the most important ones.

💳 Perplexity Expands Plaid Integration Into a Full Financial Hub, PYMNTS

🏃 The Rundown: Perplexity expanded its Plaid integration last week to cover checking accounts, savings accounts, credit cards, mortgages, auto loans, student loans, and brokerage accounts. Users in the US and Canada can link their financial accounts and use Perplexity’s “Computer” agent to analyse spending, build budget trackers, and calculate net worth. Data runs through Plaid’s infrastructure, not Perplexity’s servers.

🥡 Takeaway: This is really a story about how the idea of a PFM app is changing. The old model, the one that Mint, Copilot, and Empower were built on, required you to build all the internals first. The dashboards, the categorisation engine, the budgeting logic. You had to make it easy to bring the data to life before a consumer ever saw it.

Now? You just plumb the data into an LLM and off you go. Perplexity didn’t build a budgeting engine. It connected to Plaid and let the AI do the rest. The result is a flexible, almost personalised PFM that can be “built” for any individual consumer on the fly. Your data, the way you want it, with answers to your specific questions. Not a pre-built dashboard that assumes everyone’s financial life looks the same.

That’s a stark contrast to the PFM apps of yesterday, the ones that were built before AI changed what was possible. Why would you open a dedicated budgeting app when you can ask Perplexity “where did my money go last month?” and get context, suggestions, and follow-up analysis tailored to you?

The bigger picture: we’re watching the unbundling of financial tools into AI interfaces. Perplexity isn’t trying to be a bank. It’s trying to be the layer that sits on top of all your financial relationships and makes sense of them. For Plaid, this is the dream scenario. Every AI assistant that adds financial data just makes Plaid (and player like it) more essential.

🚀 Ramp Hits 99% AI Adoption With Internal “Glass” Platform, Ramp

🏃 The Rundown: Ramp published data last week showing 99.5% of staff are active on AI tools, with 84% using coding agents weekly. The company built an internal platform called Glass that auto-configures AI tools on SSO login and includes a “Dojo” marketplace for sharing reusable workflows. The result: 1,500 internal applications built in six weeks by over 800 employees.

🥡 Takeaway: Every fintech CEO is talking about AI adoption. Ramp just showed what it actually looks like at scale.

The numbers are striking. Not 40% adoption, not 70%. Ninety-nine point five percent. And this isn’t “we gave everyone a ChatGPT login and called it a day.” Ramp’s insight was that the barrier to AI adoption isn’t the models. It’s the setup. Terminal windows, MCP configurations, environment variables. The stuff that makes developers shrug and makes everyone else give up.

Glass solves this by auto-configuring everything when you log in. No setup, no tutorials, no IT tickets. But the really clever part is Dojo, the internal marketplace where employees package their AI workflows as shareable “skills.” One person figures out how to automate expense categorisation, and suddenly the whole company has it. That’s how you get 1,500 internal apps in six weeks.

We’ve moved from “where does AI fit in a fintech company?” to “this is how you do it.” A quiet revolution has swept through companies like Ramp, and the result isn’t robots replacing people. It’s people building more, faster, with better tools. 1,500 apps in six weeks isn’t an AI story — it’s a productivity story.

📱 Revolut Launches AIR, Its First In-App AI Financial Assistant, The Paypers

🏃 The Rundown: Revolut launched AIR (AI by Revolut), a conversational AI assistant integrated into its banking app. Available to UK customers, AIR handles spending analysis, investment tracking, subscription management, card controls, and travel planning. Revolut says data stays within the app and is not stored externally or used to train third-party AI models.

🥡 Takeaway: More people are getting a glimpse of what AI can actually do through products like Claude and Copilot. Not just suggestions, but actions. That shift in consumer expectation is what makes AIR interesting. Timing matters here, and Revolut is launching into a market where 13 million UK users are increasingly expecting their apps to do more than show them a dashboard.

Right now AIR is a smart assistant. It answers questions about your spending, tracks your investments, helps manage subscriptions. But the real play is where this heads next. AIR moving money, adjusting budgets, cancelling subscriptions on your behalf. That’s where it stops being a feature and starts being the primary way people interact with their money.

The privacy angle is worth noting too. Revolut says data stays within the app and isn’t used to train third-party AI models. That matters for European regulators, but it’s also a strategic move. Keeping that financial data out of the hands of the large model providers means Revolut retains a proprietary advantage. The AI might be commoditised, but the data it runs on isn’t.

🌏 Aspire Launches in the US to Take On Brex and Mercury, Fortune

🏃 The Rundown: Singapore-based Aspire launched in the US last week, bringing its SMB banking and spend management platform to the American market. The company serves over 50,000 businesses across Asia and offers multi-currency accounts, FX, payroll, and spend management. The US expansion is led by former Revolut executive David Harris.

🥡 Takeaway: The US SMB banking space is starting to look like a gold rush. Ramp, Brex, and Mercury have shown there’s real demand, and it’s not surprising that players from other markets are looking at this segment and thinking it’s worth trying on for size. Aspire has built a solid business serving 50,000 companies across Southeast Asia. Now it wants a piece of the American market.

It’ll be interesting to see how they adapt. Hiring David Harris from Revolut to lead the US push signals they’re serious. And the cross-border DNA is a genuine differentiator, built from day one for businesses operating across multiple markets and currencies.

The bigger question is whether the playbook translates. Consumer fintechs from overseas have largely struggled to gain a foothold in the US. But business banking is more utilitarian, and businesses are ROI-focused. If you can show a better outcome, a switch is possible. That said, the bar is high and business needs are complex. Whether Aspire can crack the US market where others haven’t is one to watch.

💰 Modus Raises $85M to Build AI-Native Accounting Firm, BusinessWire

🏃 The Rundown: Modus, an AI-native audit technology platform and holding company, announced $85 million in Seed and Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Comma Capital and Garry Tan. The company invests in and partners with established accounting firms, equipping them with AI-powered audit tooling.

🥡 Takeaway: Modus isn’t building accounting software. It’s taking stakes in accounting firms and rewiring them from the inside. The model is full-stack: capital to invest in firms, technology to automate the grunt work, and growth support covering talent, go-to-market, and back-office operations. They embed engineers directly with partner firms to turn each firm’s methodology into automated, repeatable workflows. Data cleaning agents, AI assistants that replicate partner review processes, intelligent scheduling.

They’ve already invested in a top 200 firm with over $30 million in revenue and expect to more than double that firm’s organic growth rate this year. It’s part PE roll-up, part tech platform, and it’s a clever way to get AI into an industry that’s been notoriously slow to adopt it. The accounting profession is facing a talent crunch, rising regulatory pressure, and consolidation. Modus is betting the answer is technology plus capital.

💰 Pipe Raises $16M in Turnaround Funding Round, Axios

🏃 The Rundown: Pipe, the embedded capital platform for small businesses, announced a $16 million round led by Fin Capital and MaC Venture Capital. Revenue tripled in 2025 and nearly doubled year-over-year in Q1 2026. The company has originated over $300 million in advances to more than 15,000 small businesses.

🥡 Takeaway: Pipe’s story is worth following. After a rough stretch that included layoffs and a CEO change, the company has quietly rebuilt around embedded financing for SMBs. Revenue tripling in a single year, with partners like GoCardless, Uber, and Housecall Pro distributing the product, suggests the pivot is working. Not every comeback in fintech lands. This one might.

🎧 Stablecoins Will Stop Retail From Subsidizing Wall St, Tokenized

Simon Taylor and Cuy Sheffield sit down with BitGo CEO Mike Belshe to unpack the friction in stablecoin payments for retail users and why the current interest and yield structure favours institutions over everyday consumers. A sharp conversation for anyone thinking about where stablecoins go next. Well worth a listen.

🎧 The Agentic Economy: How AI Agents Will Transform the Financial System, No Priors

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire sits down with Elad Gil to make the case that traditional banking can’t support a world of billions of AI agents, and why stablecoins and programmable money are the infrastructure layer that fills the gap. Well worth a listen if you’re thinking about where agentic commerce meets financial plumbing.

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📧 Feel free to reach out if you want to connect. I'm @alantsen on Twitter, or you can D.M. me directly by clicking the button below ↴

Ps. If you like what I'm doing with FR, please share it on your social disinformation network of choice. I'd also appreciate it if you forwarded this newsletter to a friend who might enjoy it.

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🙏 What did you think of this week's issue of FR?

I Love It! ◌ I Like It ◌ Not Bad ◌ I Don’t Like It ◌ It’s Awful